The Cancer Of The Silo: Big Company Fun

It’s exhausting…

Over the last six months I’ve been working at a very large global company, 50,000+ employees, and either I can’t believe it or I just plain forgot how divided business units and departments can be for the lamest childish reasons.

If the wrong person gets hired into a senior manager (or above) role in their respective organization, look out. That where the slow drip of poison begins. Soon, they hire dysfunctional personality counterparts as their employees whose insecurities are almost worse than their own. The gossiping starts. They don’t play by anyone’s rules. If their agenda cannot be executed on by the current system, instead of working to improve the current system, they go off and do their own thing, causing waves of friction and confusion across the whole company.

When a company gets huge and people get political and power hungry, how do you stop it from creating huge fissures in the potential unity across organizations and departments and business units? How do you kick the pedestal out from under the Napoleon middle manager that is fucking with everyone, plugging up everyone’s schedules with meetings and projects that have no ROI plan attached to them if you can’t pull rank to make it happen?

I don’t have the answers to these questions but I am trying to do the right thing on the diplomacy front and am feeling the pain right now of the silo effect.