The Real Way to Fix Silos (It’s Not an App)
My journey through toxic office cultures taught me that the best fix for division isn't a tool. It's a person.
If you’ve ever worked for any organization, large or small, you’ve probably encountered silos. You know what I’m talking about. Silos: that frustrating cultural dynamic in which teams or departments get so wrapped up in their own day-to-day business, and sometimes even their own world views, that they start to compete with each other instead of collaborating with each other. They end up talking past each other—literally, because they speak completely different languages.
I know, because I’ve been there. And if you’ve been there too, I want to share some ideas that have helped me not just cope, but actually help break silos down.
A Problem With a Name
I’ll share some history first, because it’s funny how a word that we all now throw around casually was not even in the workplace lexicon until 1988. Enter Phill S. Ensor, a man who worked in organizational development at Goodyear and came up with the phrase Functional Silo Syndrome to describe the state of things. He wrote, and I quote:
“People across the organization do not share common goals and objectives… Communication is heavily top-down… Each function develops its own special language and set of buzzwords.”
To which culture consultant Colin Ellis, writing in Medium in 2024, replied, “Yeah, but more simply:
…self-contained teams that operate in isolation, disconnected from the greater whole.”
Who was the bad guy in all of this? Leaders, according to Ellis. Leaders who like to think that if they keep their team separate, and focused, and to a certain extent controlled, then their job will be easier. Spoiler alert: it almost never is.
It’s Not Just a Big Company Problem
When I worked for massive organizations like NBCUniversal or Comcast, silos were everywhere. Duh. But then I saw the same thing in much, much smaller organizations. I know what you’re thinking: Silos in a 20, 25 employee shop? Really?
Yeah, really.
I used to work at a 25-person operation called Lehigh Valley Public Media. We had a handful of classic public media teams—production, membership, marketing, education, and engineering—all under one roof. But being under one roof didn't mean we were on the same page. Production could wander off in any direction, take as long as they wanted, and nobody in marketing had any idea what they were working on, or when it would be done. And this was an organization of 25 people.
The Philly.com gig was worse. Our digital team had their two newspaper newsrooms so completely siloed off from each other that meetings between the two sides got hostile. Each side had a language of their own, an operating procedure of their own, and not a whit of willingness to compromise or find a common goal. It was not just unproductive—it was actually toxic.
Why the Walls Go Up
So why do silos form, even in a tiny shop? I’ve never read a nice, comprehensive list that really gets at the source. But from what I’ve seen, the reasons include:
Unique Processes & Tools Teams set up their own systems, their own software, and nothing connects them.
Lack of Leadership Focus Goals pull in different directions. Collaboration never makes the priority list.
Knowledge Hoarding That one colleague who knows the password, the vendor, the shortcut—but never shares. Walking silo.
Resource Fights Budgets, staff, attention. When people feel like they’re competing, they stop sharing.
Cultural Separation Even small orgs split by schedules, habits, or office cliques can end up divided.
And the result is just as predictable as the causes. Customer experience expert Annette Franz put it this way:
“Organizational silos cause pain for your employees. They kill productivity, reduce morale, and are detrimental to your ability to create a customer-centric culture. Silos kill innovation. They create nightmares for the customer experience.”
Ouch.
The Human Fix
If you ask me, that’s the pain. But how do you fix it?
If you Google “how to fix silos,” you’ll get a hundred different answers—many of them from companies that, not coincidentally, sell collaboration software or services. Slack will tell you that the solution is more communication (hint: on Slack, of course). Asana will tell you that the solution is having one central record of work (naturally, on Asana).
But one idea that has always stuck with me came from a 2019 Harvard Business Review article titled Cross-Silo Leadership. The article’s authors proposed looking for and empowering what they called cultural brokers.
“In most companies there are people who already excel at interface collaboration, even though they have not been explicitly asked to do so… We call these people cultural brokers.”
Think of them as organizational ambassadors. The luxury goods company, Moët Hennessy España, who struggled with a long history of fighting between marketing and sales, hired two enologists—wine experts—to be part of each team. Their job was to broker the two groups together. They spoke both languages. They could talk to the marketers about the “bouquet” of a brand, then pivot and give salespeople the kind of details they needed to win over retailers. They did not fix the culture overnight. But they created just enough shared understanding for people to work together.
I’ve seen the same dynamic in play. The most valuable people in my career were not always the people with the loudest voices. They were the producers who could sit with the creative team one minute and the sales team the next, and make each side feel understood.
And that’s the point. Silos don’t just go away by themselves. Tools can help. Processes can help. But most of the real solution is human. Every organization has people who cross between different groups naturally.
Your job is to notice them. Trust them. Empower them.
Because when you do, silos stop being walls. They start being bridges.
I'm curious about your experience. Have you ever worked with a "cultural broker"—that one person who just knew how to connect different teams? What made them so effective?
Share your story in the comments.
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Teams getting stuck in their own lanes, losing sight of shared goals and wasting time on turf fights. You could try Loyally AI to spot and empower the people who naturally bridge teams. That usually leads to smoother handoffs and less friction day to day.