By Danielle Rocheleau
When we run staff engagement sessions, we hear a version of the same thing almost every time. how to break down organizational silos
My team is great. We work hard, we know what we’re doing. The team down the hall, I think they’re doing good things. I hear good things. The other location, I’m honestly not sure what happens there. And corporate? They’re out to lunch.
Confidence decays with distance.
Nobody in that description is failing at their job, and nobody is being territorial. People rate themselves and their immediate neighbours highly, and the assessment gets vaguer and less generous the further out it goes.
We hear this consistently in complex organizations with multiple programs and services. It’s one of the clearest signs of a silo, and it has almost nothing to do with how hard anyone is working.
We’ve been doing this work for almost fifteen years, and the word “silo” comes up in nearly every focus group, strategic planning process, and conversation about team culture we’ve ever facilitated. That isn’t new.
What’s new is why it’s coming up. The organizations raising it with us this year aren’t asking about efficiency. They’re asking two questions at once:
- How do we build a culture where people feel genuinely connected to each other?
- How do we make sure the people we serve can reach the whole organization, rather than the one door they happened to walk through?
For multi-service agencies, those are the same question. A family that comes in for one service and never learns about the other four isn’t experiencing a program gap. They’re experiencing your silo.
So it’s worth being honest about what silos are, why they form, and what actually shifts them. Because the usual answers don’t.
Silos are a side effect of doing the work well
Here’s the part that gets skipped: silos form because specialization works.
People naturally group with colleagues who share their skills, knowledge, and daily tasks. That’s not dysfunction. It’s how expertise gets built and how complex work gets done. As Imagine Canada puts it, silos are a necessary and effective part of getting work done, even though the word has come to carry mostly negative associations like turf wars and resource hoarding.
In mission-driven organizations, several forces push in this direction at once:
The work genuinely is different. Your clinical team, your housing team, and your finance team serve different people, answer to different ministries, and report on different outcomes. They were trained into different professions with different definitions of evidence and different ideas about what a good outcome looks like. That isn’t a failure of goodwill. It’s a real difference in the work.
And that difference shows up in the language. This is the one we see most often, and it’s rarely named.
Think of a multi-service agency where one team delivers autism services and another supports adults with developmental disabilities in independent living. Ask each team what they call the people they serve and you’ll get two different answers. Both are considered, both come out of a professional tradition, and both are defensible. Neither team is wrong.
But now those two teams are in a meeting together, using different words for the same human being. Or the same word for two different things:
- “Intake” means a first phone call to one team and a completed assessment to another.
- “Discharge” is an administrative status in one program and a clinical decision in another.
- “Family” means the legal guardian on one side of the building and the whole support network on the other.
The words a team uses carry what that team values. When two teams use different words, they aren’t just being inconsistent. They’re working from different assumptions, and those assumptions stay invisible until a client falls into the gap between them.
Ask yourself: if you asked each of your teams to define your three most-used words, how different would the answers be?
Funding reinforces it. Separate funding agreements bring separate requirements, separate reporting, and separate metrics. Each program is accountable for its own results. Research on nonprofit collaboration points to competition for limited funding, differing priorities, and a lack of shared infrastructure as the main barriers, and anyone who has managed two programs under two ministries knows exactly how that feels.
Structure and process add to it. One study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found 58 per cent of respondents pointed to things like organizational structure and red tape as contributors to siloing.
Up-and-down relationships crowd out side-to-side ones. This one is the quiet driver. Research by Tiziana Casciaro, Amy Edmondson and Sujin Jang found that people put their energy into the relationships they report to and who report to them, even though the connections across teams are where most of the value gets created. Nobody’s job description rewards the cross-team work. So it goes undone by people who genuinely like each other.
Growth and turnover then accelerate all of it. Silos rarely get built in one decision. They accumulate:
- A colleague leaves, and their responsibilities get divided among three people who each interpret them slightly differently.
- A new funding agreement arrives with new requirements.
- Someone builds a workaround to solve an immediate problem for their own team.
- A new program starts up and develops its own processes from scratch, because there was nothing to inherit.
- Decisions that used to happen with everyone in one room start happening in smaller pockets, because the room got too big.
In the moment, every one of these is a reasonable response to a changing organization. The work still needs to get done, and people find ways to keep it moving.
How you know it’s happening
Some likely familiar ways you’ve seen and felt a silo:
- Two teams use the same language for completely different things, or different language for the same thing.
- Someone who has moved between teams becomes the unofficial translator: “What they mean is…” or “The reason they do it that way is…”
- A team starts using a spreadsheet, form, or workaround that was supposed to be temporary. Eventually nobody remembers what the original system was meant to solve.
- A team is meeting its own goals, but something downstream is getting harder.
That last one deserves a pause, because it’s the one people miss. Every dashboard in the building can be green while the organization gets worse at the thing it exists to do.
The client pays first
When systems are siloed, staff spend time tracking down information that already exists somewhere else in the building. Clients navigate different offices, tell their story over and over, and manage separate paperwork for each program.
The referral that never happens is the sharpest version. Your intake worker doesn’t mention the program down the hall, not out of territoriality, but because she doesn’t know enough about it to explain what it does or who it’s for.
One leader we worked with put it to her staff this way: someone is a client of the organization, not a client of your program. That’s the standard. Most organizations are further from it than they think.
The staff pay next
Celebration becomes local. A team hits something meaningful and the people three doors down never hear about it.
Over time, staff stop feeling like they work for an organization and start feeling like they work for a program that shares a parking lot with some other programs.
The uncomfortable part
Most organizations respond to this with communication:
- Another all-staff meeting
- A better internal newsletter
- A shared drive reorganization
- A team-building day
None of those are bad things. They rarely move the needle, though, and there’s a good reason why.
There’s a good body of research on why, and it comes from settings that look like our clients’ work.
Jody Hoffer Gittell at Brandeis has spent three decades studying how teams coordinate across boundaries, in hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient clinics and mental health teams. Her framework, relational coordination, holds that working well across teams depends on three things being in place:
- Shared goals, so teams are actually pulling toward the same outcome rather than each hitting their own targets
- Shared knowledge, so each team understands what the others do and how the pieces fit together
- Mutual respect, so people take each other’s work seriously across professional lines
When those three are present, communication across teams becomes more frequent, more timely, more accurate, and more focused on solving problems. When they’re absent, more communication doesn’t help much. You get more meetings and more email, and the coordination still doesn’t happen.
This isn’t a single study. Bolton, Logan and Gittell reviewed every empirical study of relational coordination published between 1991 and 2019 and found the evidence supports the theory. And the effects show up on both sides of the ledger. One study of outpatient surgical clinics found that relational coordination across workgroups was significantly associated with staff job satisfaction, work engagement and burnout.
Gittell’s own explanation of the cause is the same one we started with: specialization improved technical skill, and it also created silos that get in the way of collaboration and continuity of care.
Worth saying plainly: the research isn’t unanimous. That same review found nearly 20 per cent of the findings on quality outcomes ran counter to the theory. In one multi-city study of community efforts to reduce reoffending, more coordination between agencies was associated with worse results, not better. Coordination is not automatically good. It has to be built around something real.
Which is the finding that has held up longest. In a study, Muzafer Sherif tested what reduces tension between groups and found that two obvious approaches did nothing on their own:
- Pleasant shared experiences. Putting the groups together in enjoyable settings changed nothing.
- Being told to get along. Appeals to do better made no difference.
What worked was giving both groups a goal they genuinely shared and could only reach by working together. Nearly seventy years of research later, that’s still the finding, and it’s still the one organizations skip.
Contact is not the same as connection. Putting siloed teams in a room together, or sending them better information about each other, doesn’t do much on its own. If you want people to work across a boundary, they need work that requires them to.
The other common explanation is the funding structure, and there’s real truth in it. But it’s also where the conversation tends to stop, because it lets everyone off the hook. Yes, the ministries are separate. Yes, the reporting is separate. Those boundaries are not going anywhere.
Which points at the actual work. The goal isn’t to break down the silos. Most of them you can’t remove, and some of them you shouldn’t want to. The goal is to build deliberate connective tissue across boundaries that are going to stay exactly where they are.
What builds connective tissue
If shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect are what make cross-team work possible, then the practical question is how you build those three on purpose. Four places to start.
Name your cultural brokers and give them a real role.
Remember the unofficial translator from the list above? The person who has moved between teams and finds themselves constantly explaining one group to another? Most organizations treat that person as a symptom, or worse, as someone doing an unglamorous favour on top of their actual job.
The research treats them as the asset. Casciaro, Edmondson and Jang studied what actually helps people work across divides and landed on four practices. The first is developing cultural brokers, meaning the people who are good at connecting across teams. The other three are worth naming too:
- Encourage open-ended questions that genuinely explore how the other team thinks, rather than questions that just confirm what you already assume
- Get people to actively take another team’s point of view, not just hear about it
- Widen people’s view of the organization beyond their immediate circle of colleagues
They also note that redesigning the formal structure is one way to break silos, but it’s costly, confusing and slow. For most of our clients, that settles it. You probably aren’t restructuring. You can absolutely identify the four or five people in your organization who already do this bridging work, name it as part of their role, and give them the time and standing to keep doing it.
Ask yourself: who in your organization already speaks more than one team’s language? Does anyone’s job description say so?
Build shared work, not shared meetings.
This is the shared goals condition, and it’s where most organizations think they’re already doing the work. A standing cross-team meeting where each department gives a status update is contact, not a shared goal. Everyone reports, nobody actually needs anybody, and attendance quietly declines.
What works is a piece of real work that no single team can finish alone. A service pathway redesign. A joint response to a community need that crosses two programs. An intake process rebuilt by the people on both ends of it.
One client we did strategic planning with, a children’s mental health organization, holds an annual strategy café. Every team comes back to the pillars of the strategic plan and shows what they’ve moved forward against them over the year.
The structure is what makes it shared work rather than a round of updates. The pillars belong to the whole organization, not to any one program, so every team is reporting on progress toward the same small set of goals. Teams present their partnerships alongside their own activities, which means the cross-boundary work is part of what gets accounted for rather than an afterthought. And the programs pillar and the partnerships pillar are worked through together, because in that organization you can’t make progress on one without the other.
They also make it fun. One year they framed the day as having won the strategy championship: noise makers, a celebration, two staff doing colour commentary and play-by-play, another working the room as a roaming reporter. Their executive director set two goals for the day, fun and informative, and hit both.
But the reason it builds connective tissue isn’t the theatre. It’s that everyone in the room is working toward the same pillars and has to show their contribution in the same frame as everyone else.
One caution. Shared goals work best when each team brings something different to the job. If everyone is doing the same generic task and still thinking of themselves as “my team” versus “that team,” working side by side can actually sharpen the divide rather than soften it.
So when you design the project, give each team a piece the others genuinely can’t do. Don’t just mix people together and hope.
Build a shared glossary, and treat it as culture work.
This is the shared knowledge condition, and it sounds like an administrative task. It isn’t.
Get your teams in a room and ask them to define the words your organization uses most:
- Client, or participant, or resident, or whatever each team says
- Intake
- Discharge
- Family
- Case
- Referral
- Closure
Then compare the answers. The disagreements are the useful part, because each one points at a difference in assumption that has been operating silently.
You won’t land on one word for everything, and you shouldn’t try. Some differences are professionally required. What changes is that everyone now knows the difference exists and knows what the other team means. That’s the difference between a translation problem and a misunderstanding.
Reconnect to values, but attach them to something.
Shared values do real work here, and this is where a lot of our clients start. But values on their own are exactly the kind of appeal that research says doesn’t move anything. A values refresh at the staff day, followed by business as usual, changes very little.
Values build mutual respect when they’re used to make a decision that two teams have to make together. What does “client-centred” mean when Program A’s intake process creates work for Program B? That’s a values conversation with something at stake, and people remember it.
Fix the celebration problem on purpose.
If success is only ever celebrated locally, the organization stops being visible to itself. This one is cheap to fix and surprisingly effective. Make sure wins travel, and make sure the story includes who else made them possible.
Where to start
You probably can’t remove the boundaries in your organization, and you may not want to. Multi-service work comes with real differences:
- Different ministries
- Different professional training
- Different clients
- Different reporting requirements
That’s not a flaw. It’s a sign you’re doing something substantial.
What you can do is stop treating the boundaries as a communication failure and start treating the crossings as something to build on purpose. Four questions to take to your leadership team:
- Who already bridges between our teams, and do they have the standing and the time to do it?
- What piece of real work would require two teams to genuinely need each other?
- If we asked each team to define our most-used words, where would the answers diverge?
- Where do our values get tested at the seam between programs, and who is in that conversation?
That’s the shift from an organization that shares a building to an organization that shares a purpose.
If you’re working through this with your leadership team and want a hand, get in touch. We’d be happy to talk about where you are.