What does it actually look like?

What do we get out of it?

How do we make it happen?

These are the three central questions facing any attempt to break down walls between offices.

The barrier between alumni relations and career services is one of the most heavily scrutinized, but many alumni relations and career services teams still struggle to answer those three questions when considering a partnership or merger. Some institutions, though, have managed to answer them.

Michelle Marks-Hook, Volunteer Program Director at the University of Rochester’s Gwen M. Green Center, recently presented on the topic at the CASE District 2 Conference. I discussed her presentation with her beforehand to learn more about how the alumni relations and career services teams at the U of R are working together, what they get out of it, and how they made it happen. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and continuity.

Silos. Silos! We all know they stand in the way of our teams being more innovative, collaborative, and effective.

But what are silos, really? They are walls that are there because we put them there. We put them there every day with our lack of openness, our protecting scarce resources, and our intense focus on our own goals without consideration of others’.

Silos aren’t structures—they are systems, systems that we create and sustain ourselves. And it takes systems to dismantle them.

Robin Doty is Senior Director of Alumni and External Engagement at Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School. She and members of her team recently presented on this topic at the CASE D7 Conference in California. I spoke with Robin and asked her to share some insights from her presentation, “Disrupting the Alumni Engagement Ecosystem to Be More Innovative, Collaborative, and Effective.”