The business silo
and how we bridge the gap.
Have you ever been sitting in a meeting where different areas of your business come together to talk about a concern or problem?
These are the meetings we all hate.
No one comes prepared. Everyone has “better” things to be doing. And in the end, everyone continues to sit in the silo of their business area without raising their hand to tackle the issue.
Sound familiar?
I think the silos we set up in businesses are one of the most detrimental structures. But not for the reason you might think.
Most people preach that you need to breakdown all the silos. That you need to get everyone at the IC level connecting with each other. Cross-functional teams. Collaboration workshops. Matrix structures.
Don’t get me wrong, we need some of that. But I don’t think that alone will ever be successful.
Instead, we need better bridges between the silos.
From where I sit as an HRBP, I hear from so many people about their frustrations with problems that never get solved. I’ll talk to an employee who’s having an issue with a process. I ask if they’ve told their manager.
Of course they have.
Then I check with the manager. They tell me they’ve laddered up the concerns to the department lead. They’re having the same issues themselves.
So my final stop is with the department lead. And I bet you can guess what I hear. They’ve gotten an earful from everyone and they’re discussing it with the other leads, but there still hasn’t been any progress.
This happens constantly. In every organization I’ve worked in. Problems get identified, get escalated, and then sit there while everyone waits for someone else to fix them.
Here’s what happens while everyone’s waiting.
The employee who raised the issue stops raising issues. They decide it’s not worth the effort if nothing changes anyway. They stop trusting that problems get solved.
The manager gets burned out playing middle management. Hearing complaints from their team, escalating them up, getting nothing back. Repeat. They start to feel like a message relay instead of someone who can actually make things happen.
The department lead gets overwhelmed. They’re collecting problems from multiple teams, trying to coordinate with other leads who are equally overwhelmed, and nothing moves because everyone’s waiting for perfect alignment before acting.
Meanwhile, the actual problem, the thing causing friction in the business, just keeps causing friction. Day after day. Week after week. Until it’s so normalized that people forget it’s even a problem.
I watched this happen with a reporting process that everyone knew was broken. ICs complained. Managers escalated. Leaders discussed it in their meetings for months.
Nothing changed until someone finally left over it. Then suddenly it became urgent. Suddenly there were resources to fix it. But by then, we’d already lost the person and damaged trust with everyone else who’d been screaming about it.
So why does this keep happening?
To me, there are two things going on.
First, there isn’t the right incentive to reduce friction in the business. Leaders are measured on their silo’s output, not on solving cross-functional problems. So cross-functional problems sit at the bottom of everyone’s priority list.
But the second, and bigger, concern is that it takes so many people noticing an issue to only bring it up to the next level. And even then, it just sits there. We’re missing a very important link. If we continue to stick with the status quo, things will never get better. They will only get worse.
Businesses are missing a system of bridges. Bridges between the current silos we have.
Breaking down silos is too ambitious. So instead, we need to build collaboration bridges between different levels.
In the example above, why couldn’t the manager who saw the issues reach out to their counterpart in the other silo to help break down and implement a solution? Why does it have to go up two levels, across, and back down before anyone can act?
Here’s what this looks like in practice.
Give managers permission to solve cross-functional problems without waiting for leadership alignment. Not everything needs to be escalated. Some things just need two managers in different departments to talk to each other and figure it out.
Create regular touch-points between peer managers across silos. Not big collaboration workshops. Just recurring conversations where they can surface friction points and solve them before they become escalations. Make it part of the role, not an extra thing they have to fit in.
Measure leaders on whether problems in their area get solved, not just whether they escalate them properly. If the same issue keeps coming up month after month, that’s a failure. Even if they’re “communicating well” about it.
Empower people at every level to build their own bridges. The IC who notices an issue should be able to talk to the IC in the other department. The manager should be able to coordinate with their peer. The leader should be able to make a decision with their counterpart without needing three layers of approval.
Picture this. A manager notices a process issue that’s affecting their team and another department. Instead of escalating it and waiting, they reach out to the manager in that other department. They spend thirty minutes talking through it. They identify a simple fix. They implement it. Problem solved.
That’s not breakdown of silos. That’s bridges. And it works because it doesn’t require restructuring the entire organization. It just requires giving people permission and incentive to solve problems at the level where they’re happening.
You already know where the friction is in your organization. You know which cross-functional issues keep coming up in meetings without getting solved.
The question is whether you’re building bridges or just escalating problems and hoping someone else fixes them.
Remote or in-person, silos will always exist. The question is whether people can cross them when they need to. Or whether they’re stuck waiting for permission that never comes.
What’s one bridge you could build this week?