The Red Wagon Institute’s goal is to tear down silos.
Not on farms, where they are useful, but in businesses where they can be hidden in plain sight.
“What we found with silos is people either don’t know they have them or they’re pretty ingrained and people are unwilling to move past them,” says Paul Speirs-Hernandez, found and master trainer for the Red Wagon Institute.
The Red Wagon Institute’s newest class focuses on eliminating silos – divisions in companies that prevent progress. The Summer Camp, is a one-day, experiential course that uses team building activities to highlight how quickly silos form and how to eliminate them.
Located in Las Vegas, the company especially caters to gaming companies through training sessions that address and work to eliminate intra-company barriers.
The organization’s newest class is designed to take place outdoors to get participants away from their usual office spaces for a daylong intensive learning session. Starting with competition among teams, Summer Camp instructors provide a common language about silos and then segues into team processes, challenging participants to learn from their work and go beyond comfort zones.
Speirs-Hernandez says that whether it’s a budget meeting for a large casino or developing a customer service strategy for a small business, it’s beneficial to work together.
“Without that big picture, it’s just not helpful when you’re withholding information,” he says.
Speirs-Hernandez emphasizes that silos are not erected deliberately.
“In our experience it’s something that happens either from a lack of communication or a lack of trust that people don’t know exists,” he says. “Suddenly you’re in this situation where all of your departments are operating like independent businesses. … What summer camp does is it puts a clear spotlight on how quickly silos and cliques can form and how they can be bad for business.”
Feedback from Red Wagon’s other courses, such as Managing to Leading and Curing Cantcer, has been positive. A woman who initially viewed the training sessions “touchy-feely nonsense” later told Speirs-Hernandez that she’d been able to accomplish all goals in her five-year plan in less than five years.
“She was operating in a silo of herself, where she couldn’t get past her own barriers,” he says.
Another attendee touched bases two months after his team attended Red Wagon’s Curing Cantcer class.
“He said his work team and his home team were completely different,” Speirs-Hernandez says. “`We just decided we’re going to stop saying `can’t’ (a reference to the course Curing Cantcer) and trust each other.’”
For the gaming industry, Summer Camp and Red Wagon’s other courses can provide a way to integrate all aspects of a casino operation. Especially important for gaming operations is the Curing Cantcer session, which emphasizes ways to focus on what can be done with customer requests customers rather than denying them.
Noting that casino players clubs are the hub of interaction with players, Speirs-Hernandez — who has more than 30 years of experience working with gaming operators through his public relations agency Steinbeck Communications – says it’s essential to please customers at that point of contact, where saying “can’t” to a customer may cause unforeseen issues. Patrons can walk away upset and never return, start going to another casino, or go on social media and express their disappointment.
“Instead of focusing on what they can do for their customers they’re focusing on they can’t do, and that’s going to be bad for business,” Speirs-Hernandez says. “It’s the same thing with silos (at casinos). If the hotel and food and beverage and slot and entertainment are all holding their information to themselves, that doesn’t help the customer. The customer doesn’t care if you have different departments.”
