Blurring the Lines

Growing up, I was fortunate enough to attend a small school, with only 73 students in my high school graduating class. Our entire school—kindergarten through 12th grade—occupied one building. But I never felt I was missing out by not being part of a larger school. In my less-populated one, I had the opportunity to get involved in multiple aspects of student life.

Even though there were comparatively few of us at our school, like most other kids, my classmates tended to identify with a single niche group and stick with it. There were the smart kids, the athletic kids, the musical kids, the artistic kids, and the fringe kids, whose allied group grew out of not wanting to identify with anyone.

The ease of aligning with people who are like you and the comfort of staying there, rather than risking moving into a different, unfamiliar group, meant that not many students expanded beyond the social circle of their close friends. Cliques erected fences around themselves and were hostile to other cliques. It felt easier to exclude people you didn’t identify with rather than risk getting to know them.

I didn’t agree with that approach. I played basketball and was on the track team with the athletic kids. I sang in the choir and was the band equipment manager with the musical kids. I was in the science club, on the trivia team, and in student government with the more studious kids. I got to know the fringe kids by mingling with them during study hall. It was easy for me to float among the various student factions, and they all accepted me as I was. But when I tried to bring them together, I had little success.

My social inclinations at school influenced how I approach the workplace. At the office, cliques were replaced by distinct departments—each one composed of employees with the same skill set who had little to say to their colleagues in other departments. Just like at school, I didn’t see the lines that separated these functional departments blur very often. This resulted in the self-​segregation of groups of workers by their specific skill set, often reinforced by a like-mindedness that excluded other groups—to the detriment of the organization as a whole.

In addition to consisting of a series of departments with little overlap, many companies also adopt a hierarchy that limits interaction among employees at multiple levels of an organization. I didn’t like that in school, and I certainly don’t like it at work. So I’ve again taken a different approach, integrating HR into each department of my company.

I’ve embedded myself across the organization
and implemented a strat-egy of integration. It’s taken time, but the silos are crumbling. Employees have found they’re much more productive when they work together as the fabric of a cohesive whole.

It’s time for HR professionals to stop operating in departmental siloes and instead blur the lines that artificially separate them from the rest of the organization. Companies divided into departments that operate in a hierarchy are not as productive as they can be when they are interconnected and collaborative. The key is blurring the lines until they disappear. 

Steve Browne, SHRM-SCP, is chief people officer for ­LaRosa’s Inc., a restaurant chain in Ohio and Indiana with 11 locations. The author of HR Unleashed!! (SHRM, 2023),  HR Rising!! (SHRM, 2020) and HR on Purpose!! (SHRM, 2017), he has been an HR professional for more than 30 years.