That’s Not My Zone
“Yeah, but that’s not my zone, that’s their zone.” How do you overcome a wrong mindset that creates silos and excuses within your team? Most facilities and large properties need a simple and efficient way to manage their work flow. One simple way to accomplish this is to divide a large area into smaller areas of responsibility. In developing these smaller areas, aka zones, it allows for better attention to detail within the individual areas and prevents us spending all our time in one location all week long. These zones are designed to help hold people accountable and produce quality work over the entire property. Our workers may have a Monday zone, Tuesday zone, etc. This helps us stay on schedule. But here is what we may miss. In the big picture, the entire area, all the zones, the entire property is still our responsibility, not just what we call our zone.
The downside to having a zone schedule is that it may mislead our team members into incorrectly thinking that their zone is all they need to manage and work in. If a need comes up for them to go outside their zone, it can sometimes become a slippery slope, leading to a negative attitude about “having to do all the work in someone else’s zone.”
The mindset should be: Zones are a convenience for us to use, not a way to limit us. Zones are an intra-departmental tool designed to help us be efficient. They are an easy way to define the workspace. On the flip side, our customers don’t see zones, they see one area, one property, one location and they see one group managing it. It is all ours to maintain – we are the “one” group that manages it.
A good leader reminds the team often that zones are used for convenient workflow, but all the zones belong to all of us. “That’s not my zone,” is not the mindset we desire our people to have. At times it is necessary to shift resources and assets across the zones requiring our people to “cross-over” to a different zone. Don’t let your crew hold you hostage to zone thinking.
Here are a few practical solutions. First, explain why a team may need to go into another zone to help on a project. This helps build higher levels of cooperation and results. “Do it because I said so,” doesn’t work if you want to encourage higher levels of trust and buy-in. Second, a continuous reminder regarding the purpose of zones, why we have them and how to use them will benefit your team. And last, cross training is another good way to overcome the “not my zone” mindset. When employees get to work in other zones, they have hands-on the other zone and the ownership goes up, along with the realization that all zones belong to the “one” group that manages it.
“With silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led.”
~ Pearl Zhu
