How do you align your leadership team when it feels like everyone is working in a silo?

When I took over leading the UK & European team at LifeWorks, one of my first tasks was to ensure everyone on the team was aligned properly. Historically, there had been siloed disciplines and a bit of a blame culture. For example, we being are blocked by X team I don't know what they are doing.

I fully believe that to change the culture you need to start at the top and lead by example. I also believe that one person cannot dictate a culture by themselves, it needs to be something that everyone is willing to invest in.

So I sat down with my leadership team and a pile of post it notes and I asked them to write down on these post-it notes the values they thought were important to have within their teams.

After around 15 minutes, we started grouping the post-its in to similar categories, and then proceeded in a round of (dot voting)[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dot-voting/] to establish which values we wanted to bring forward. We then took the top six values and wrote up what they meant.

Once we had agreed our values, it was important for us to be able to keep ourselves and each other honest on them. So in our fortnightly team lead meetings, I asked everyone to come with two "awards" and we would go round the room at the start of the session and share our picks.

The first was an award to one person in the leadership team who had demonstrating one of these value, and explain why, to ensure we hold others accountable.

The second was award to ourselves for demonstrating one of the values, and explain why, to ensure we hold ourselves accountable.

It felt a bit strange at first, handing out pretend awards to each other - but it got us in the mindset for how we wanted to interact with each other. Once the teams were working better with each other we reduced the frequency - but at that point, the values were embedded in leaderships mind and collaboration and culture massively improved.

Here are the values we came up with:

• Accountability

  • Being responsible for your actions
  • Being responsible for the actions of your team
  • Don't blame - fix, learn and move on

• Collaboration

  • Working together
  • Being one team
  • Keeping integrity as a team

• Empowerment

  • Empower our teams to make their own decisions
  • Empower our teams to succeed
  • Empower and challenge our teams to be better versions of themselves

• Transparency

  • Not hiding or controlling information
  • Better communication
  • Understanding others perspectives and listening to the team
  • Don't ignore problems - we might not be able to fix something right now, but we should record and be aware of the issue

• Trust

  • Be the support you would like to have
  • Live what we preach as a business
  • Belief that other have good intentions and work to the best of their abilities

• Vision

  • A compelling and clear reason to take your team in a certain direction
  • One common vision within the business
  • Understand our business
  • Make a difference