Chief People Officer | P&L & Business Leader | Board Advisor | Culture & Talent Strategist | Growth & Transformation Expert | Architect of High-Performing Teams & Scalable Organizations
Silos are killing your business. You just might be too polite to admit it. I once sat in a leadership meeting where every team leader walked in with their own deck. Each deck had bold KPIs. Wins to celebrate. Metrics to prove they were “crushing it.” And yet… the business wasn’t growing. We had engineering, sales, marketing, and product all winning in their own lanes, but nobody crossing the finish line together. We weren’t running one race. We were running four. The cracks showed up everywhere: duplicate work, missed handoffs, features built without customer input, campaigns launched that sales couldn’t sell, customer escalations bouncing between teams like a hot potato. Everyone was working hard. No one was working together. Then came the turning point. We were gearing up for a major product launch - big revenue riding on it. The original plan was neat: each function owned their piece, passed the baton, hoped it all clicked in the end. But two weeks in, we saw the pattern repeating. So, we blew it up. We formed a shared mission team: one product lead, one sales lead, one marketing lead, one ops lead. Every morning, they met in the same room - no decks, no silos, no hiding behind functions. They built the strategy together. Marketing didn’t “hand off” campaigns - they designed them with Sales at the table. Product didn’t ship features in isolation - they pressure-tested them with Customer Success before writing code. Ops wasn’t cleaning up after everyone - they were shaping decisions upstream. The result? The launch landed ahead of schedule. Revenue targets hit. The energy shifted - people were actually excited to work together. That quarter was a mirror for leadership. The problem wasn’t capability. It was design. We’d built a structure that allowed - even rewarded - siloed behavior. So we changed the design: Shared missions, not just shared goals. Real connection moments, not forced “team building.” Making work visible - not just what teams do, but why it matters. Rotating who leads key moments so everyone has skin in the game. And - most importantly, honest conversations about why the silos existed in the first place. Silos aren’t born out of malice. They’re born out of human nature. We stick to what feels safe. But collaboration can feel just as natural if we design for it. The executive team learned something profound: You can’t “inspire” your way out of silos. You have to build experiences that make working together the easiest path to winning. And once you’ve tasted what real collaboration does to performance? There’s no going back to parallel lanes.
This nails it. Silos aren’t just a communication issue — they’re an incentive issue. When success is defined by function, collaboration becomes optional. Redefine success at the system level, and behavior follows.
The more we 'collaborate,' the looser accountability gets. The problem is structural, not social. This is what slowly kills revenue and morale.
Ironically, the cost of co-creating in the first place is minimal to the hours, weeks of time creating the competing decks to defend their silo - which is natural. Sometimes you have to step back and see the bigger picture.
Reminds me of a staff meeting with a Premier League team, morning after a game. I had only started there, I'm sitting in the corner. Everyone is waiting on the Head Coach. Fitness coach is looking at game data, so proud of how fit the team are, dietitian praising how lean and strong the team look, goalkeeping coach about how much work he got done last week ... and the old assistant coach tired of hearing everyone defending their 'silo' said "So is that why we lost 3 nil?"
Brilliantly articulated Elaine Page You’ve captured one of the most under-diagnosed leadership challenges: organizational design that rewards individual success over collective outcomes.
Elaine Page This is gold because silos don’t start as strategy problems, they start as safety problems. Leaders build walls to protect control, not realizing they’re starving collaboration. In my people first coaching, I help executives redesign those invisible structures moving from parallel performance to shared accountability. The magic isn’t in motivation; it’s in system alignment. When leaders make collaboration the safest path, trust and performance scale fast.
Well said, Elaine. It’s never about people not wanting to work together, but more about how things are set up. While it requires a lot of effort, when people open up to learn and figure things out together, that’s when real progress actually happens.
So true. Silos rarely come from bad people, they come from systems that reward individual wins over shared outcomes. When leadership shifts the focus from “my metrics” to “our mission,” alignment starts to happen naturally.
Well said. True alignment happens when teams build together.
Global HR Executive | AI-Enabled Talent & Leadership | Executive Coach & Strategic Advisor
2wSuch a powerful story. Silos often get framed as communication issues, but they’re really design issues. When structure, incentives, and connection moments reinforce collaboration, teams stop optimizing for their own success and start building toward shared outcomes.