Breaking the Silo Mentality

Have you ever wanted to break away from the distractions of your day and knuckle down into creating something new? There are times when it’s productive and helpful to have others around, but there are also occasions when we need some ‘alone time’. This is all good – except when we lose the balance. Too much alone time can silo us from others.

Car dealerships can be fertile grounds for the silo mentality, which is detrimental to both morale and productivity. In an article that I read recently, it described how ‘silo mentality destroys trust, cuts off communications, and fosters complacency.’

Your departments, from accounting to new vehicle sales, can easily become siloed ‘mini-businesses’. This hinders organizational ability to change, grow and meet new customer demands.

There are many ways in which this can develop, but how you as a leader in your organization behave and engage with your team can have a powerful impact in avoiding, or compounding, silo mentality.

The following are some of the ways in which you can reduce the silo mentality in your dealership:

1. Create a unified vision

Teams need to collaborate towards the same vision. Create a unified vision of team collaboration.

Get staff to understand how their functions affect each other and why collaboration behind a unified vision is better for the entire company. The leadership team first needs to understand the company’s long term goals, department objectives and key initiatives.

When managers show unity behind the unified vision they will encourage trust, create empowerment and inspire a collective mentality to break down barriers to cooperation, communication and collaboration.

2. Work towards common goals

Teams need to share common company goals if there is to be any organizational success. Everyone must know how their individual goals contribute positively to these goals.

A positive way to do this is to have a defined vision, mission, values or expected behavior. Have each department’s division-specific goals reflect the overall goals of the company. Employees need effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to allow them to see progress towards common company goals.

Going forward, establish weekly/monthly meetings for departments to work on each other’s pain points, so that they can be helped in accomplishing their goals; which will be positive for the whole dealership. This will also develop an understanding of each other’s work for the different teams in your dealership and reinforce the value that every person adds.

3. Collaborative training

Training everyone in cross-departmental exercises is one way to break down silos. Again, the goal of these activities is to increase cooperation, communication and collaboration.

Implementing collaboration software is helpful. A streamlined process for the salesperson to book a service appointment at a time when the service team is available for it, and at the same time gives the marketing and sales teams the same information about a customer.

This information needs to be regularly updated and, very importantly, employees need to be trained regularly in the effective use of the tools, software and processes in place to keep them all engaged.

4. A culture of communication

Many dealerships prioritise external communications to the customer more than internal staff communications.

Creating an internal communications system between all departments is essential in achieving your dealership goals. At your monthly meetings, you and your leadership team can decide on initiatives to implement, don’t only speak about numbers and targets at these meetings.

Communicating will often foster collaboration among the different teams such as sales, finance, service, marketing and accounting, leading them to make better-informed decisions, to think about each other and serve your customers better, in the process increasing both sales and job satisfaction.

5. Motivate and incentivize

One of the best ways to motivate everyone to work together towards a common goal would be to evaluate the compensation models. Most of us are motivated to collaborate, communicate and cooperate when our remuneration is linked to everyone winning.

Incentives should reflect the added effort in working towards common company goals. Consider it as added reward and motivation for all employees to pull fiercely in the same direction.

Shrinking the silos

Breaking down the silos is not an easy task, but pretending they aren’t there is more damaging to your dealership culture, and all concerned. The above steps are designed to help facilitate a unified vision and establish realistic steps to providing team members with a clear purpose and means to accomplishing your ultimate goal, together. Remember – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.