The symptom is familiar: Sales complains about IT, IT about the business unit, the business unit about compliance. Projects are delayed because information does not flow. Decisions are blocked because no one wants to be responsible—or everyone does at the same time.
The conclusion follows quickly: silos. Divisions work against each other instead of with each other. The solution seems obvious: break down silos.
This is the fallacy: silos are not the problem. They are the symptom. The problem is missing bridges. Anyone who fights silos by tearing down structures does not create a better company. They create chaos.
A member of management I advised had tried exactly that. He dissolved the divisional boundaries between Sales and Marketing and created one large “Customer Team”. Six months later, the result was not better collaboration, but paralyzing ambiguity: no one knew who was responsible for what anymore. The informal power struggles that replaced the formal structures were more destructive than the silos before. The solution was not less structure, but better connections between the existing structures.
Silos are the logical result of organizational design—and often of success. Specialization creates efficiency: Sales focuses on clients, IT on systems, Finance on numbers. Without this division of labor, no complex organization would be able to act. Clear responsibility creates accountability: if everyone is responsible for everything, no one is responsible for anything. And divisional identity creates cohesion: teams need a sense of “we”. “We in Sales”, “We in Development”—that is not toxic, it is human.
Silos only become a problem when specialization turns into isolation. And the distinction is crucial: do you have a structure problem or an isolation problem? The solutions are fundamentally different.
| Healthy structure | Isolation |
|---|---|
| Clear responsibility | Territorial behavior |
| Specialization | Siloing |
| Divisional identity | Tribal thinking |
| Autonomy in core topics | Autonomy in everything |
| Cooperation when needed | Cooperation as the exception |
When divisions isolate themselves, it is rarely due to a lack of willingness. The causes are systemic.
Incentives reward divisional success, not company success. The division head is measured by the results of their division. Collaboration takes time but does not add points to their scoreboard. Rational behavior: focus on one’s own division. Anyone who complains about silos but rewards individual successes does not have a culture problem, but an incentive problem.
Unclear responsibility for cross-cutting topics. Digitalization, customer experience, data quality—the most important topics cut across the divisional structure. If no one is clearly responsible, either everyone fights for ownership or no one feels responsible. Both lead to gridlock.
Lack of spaces for exchange. People cooperate with people they know. If leaders from different divisions only meet in board meetings—formal, agenda-driven, under time pressure—no relationships form. Without relationships, no trust. Without trust, no cooperation.
Historical conflicts. A project that went wrong. A dispute between predecessors. A reorganization that produced losers. These stories linger for a long time, even if the people involved have long since changed.
Leadership that models silos. If the leadership team itself does not cooperate, why should the divisions? If, as a member of management, you speak with your division heads only bilaterally, rarely as a team, then you have established isolation from the top.
Isolation cannot be solved through appeals. It requires structural changes. Organizational researcher Jay Galbraith has shown that cooperation does not depend on culture, but on mechanisms: who works with whom on what, and what they are rewarded for, determines behavior—not mission statements or workshops.
First: change incentives.
What is rewarded happens. What is not rewarded does not happen. Include shared goals in leaders’ performance evaluations—not 100% divisional targets, but 70/30 or 60/40 with cross-cutting KPIs. Make cross-divisional successes visible in town halls, reviews, and internal communications. And address refusal to cooperate—not publicly, but clearly in the leadership discussion.
Second: create processes that force collaboration.
Collaboration that depends on the goodwill of individuals is not collaboration—it is coincidence. Define handover points between divisions: who delivers what, when, and at what quality? Synchronize planning cycles; if Sales plans in January and IT in March, alignment is impossible. Create escalation paths that work—direct and fast, not across multiple hierarchy levels. And ensure a shared data foundation, because data silos are often worse than organizational silos.
Third: connect people.
In the end, people work together—not org charts. Create bridge roles: people whose explicit task is to connect divisions, with a clear engagement, not as a powerless staff function. Enable rotation: leaders who have worked in multiple divisions understand the other perspective. And create informal spaces outside regular meetings that enable real relationships.
Structure beats culture. If you want cooperation, you must reward it—not demand it.
Some common approaches create more problems than they solve. The matrix organization as a cure-all produces, in practice, dual reporting lines, unclear responsibility, and political conflict. Endless coordination rounds where everyone has a say in everything drain the organization. Tearing down structures replaces formal power with informal power struggles, which are usually more destructive. And appeals to culture change nothing as long as incentives and processes reward isolation.
Complaining about silos is easy. Everyone nods, everyone is against them, no one has to change. Solving silos requires uncomfortable questions about incentives, processes, and one’s own leadership behavior. It requires decisions that produce losers. It requires patience, because trust does not emerge overnight.
Divisions do not work against each other because people are difficult. They do it because the system rewards it. Anyone who changes the system changes behavior.
Tomorrow, take on the cross-cutting topic that has been stuck between two divisions for months. Do not ask, “Who is blocking?” but “What is the system rewarding right now?” The answer will show you where you need to start.
The culture you did not order – silo thinking is often a symptom of lived culture, not organizational structure.
Influence without power – building bridges requires influence where there is no authority to issue instructions.
Proven tools and models for self-application are available under Solutions.
If you want to take these thoughts further for your company, a no-obligation initial conversation is worthwhile.
