Our organziation is interested in creating teambuilding opportunities that build teams across departments. We have some "silo" issues in our organization rather than everyone seeing their inter-connectedness to the whole.

While some in company leadership have suggested having different groups participate in teambuilding games and other non-work related fun activities I do not think this will address the issues. Does anyone have any suggestions or approaches you have seen work?

You are on the right track. My experience with cross functional and functional teambuilding is that you need to do an assessment to define what the cause is of the silo culture/lack of team work. It works much better when know what the problem is, then you are not throwing a team building activity or two at the problem and hope it works. By the way most silo's start with leadership setting the example then holding team members accountable for working together.

I agree. Rather than looking at teambuilding, you might want to consider holding 'best practice' groups with key members of staff from the 'silos' working together.

Their role would be to develop ideas that would help the business work towards combined goals. You could also rotate the members to gain involvement.

My take, from experience, is that the silo mentality cannot be changed by training because it is not a training issue. What works best is addressing the process as a whole and clearly defining the inputs and outputs of every person/unit/department within that process. Beware of the different interfaces between each person/unit/department for it is there that are usually significant problems.

When seeing the silo mentality through the linear process of producing a service or a product, its absurdity becomes clearly visible and only then is it possible to address team work with team building activities and the likes.

Timeframe? 18 to 36 months depending on many factors (company size, products/services, willingness, buy-in, efforts, investments, etc.).

We are in the 18th month of this effort and it has been a bumpy ride!