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Disconnected Teams: Why a Company's Areas Stop Collaborating

2 hours ago
6 min read

In many companies it is common to see situations such as the Finance team preparing the month-end closing report while the Sales team prepares its own for the same management meeting. Both work with the best intentions, but when the results are compared, figures appear that don't quite match. In other cases, a project can sit stalled for weeks because one department is waiting for a piece of data that another area already has, but it was never shared.


This is not about a lack of commitment or ill will between departments. Each team is focused on meeting its own objectives. The problem appears when areas start working as if they were islands: they function well individually, but communication and collaboration between them become increasingly difficult. That is where organizational silos begin to form.



What an organizational silo is and why it goes unnoticed


According to the work management platform Asana (n.d.), an organizational silo is "a team, department, or group of people that is isolated from the flow of information" of the rest of the company. In other words, it is an area that keeps delivering results, meets its objectives, and works well independently, but has stopped sharing information and coordinating efforts with the other teams.


And why is it so hard to detect? Because from inside each department everything seems to be working. The trouble appears when a process needs to pass from one area to another. That is where delays begin and small disconnections start to affect everyone's work for lack of information.


The most complicated part is that these failures don't usually show up in the indicators of a single department. They only become evident when they start to affect the whole organization, whether because projects move more slowly, decisions are made with incomplete information, or the customer experience ends up being quite draining.

Signs that your areas have stopped collaborating

Organizational silos don't appear overnight. Before becoming evident, they usually show up as small coordination failures that end up affecting the work between teams. Some of the most common are:


  • Delivery dates that no longer match. One area commits to a deadline without knowing that another already has its capacity taken or a different schedule.

  • Priorities that are not aligned. What is urgent for one team can wait for another, and no one ends up defining what should be addressed first.

  • Resources that compete with each other. Two departments need the same person, the same vendor, or the same tool at the same time, and the conflict is only discovered once the work is already under way.

  • Budgets that are planned separately. Each area organizes its projects independently, but during execution, shared expenses or resources appear that no one had considered.



The structural causes of the silo, beyond people's attitude

When areas stop collaborating, it is easy to think the problem is people's attitude. However, the origin often lies in the structure of the organization, since each team meets its objectives, but no one defined how they should work together.

Three structural causes help explain it:

  • Each leader answers for the results of their own area. If their indicators depend on those results, it is natural for them to concentrate their efforts there. It is not necessarily selfishness, but acting in line with the way the organization measures their performance.

  • The company grew, but its way of coordinating did not evolve at the same pace. People, departments, and new objectives were added, while the processes for making decisions and sharing information stayed the same.

  • No one takes responsibility for what happens between one area and another. At Endobrand we talk here about accountability, that is, the ability to take ownership of what is happening and take the initiative to address it, even when it is not strictly "your" problem. Many silos persist because what happens between two teams does not end up being the clear responsibility of either.


Research by Eightfold AI and 3Sixty Insights, reported by Case (2024) and conducted with 500 HR leaders and 1,200 employees, found that more than 8 out of 10 companies report a critical misalignment between the initiatives of their areas and the overall objectives of the business. That lack of alignment would have an estimated cost of 8.9 trillion dollars a year for the global economy.


A common example is an organization that decides to update its CRM system, a change that directly impacts the Sales, Finance, and Customer Experience areas. Each leader seeks to minimize the impact on their team's indicators, but no one defines a coordinated way to decide which area should take on the changes first. The result is disagreements between departments, meetings that drag on without reaching a decision, and a constant search for someone to blame, even pointing at the vendor in charge of the implementation. In the end, each area's objectives end up prevailing over those of the organization and, ultimately, over the customer experience.


Leader behaviors that reinforce isolation between areas

So far we have talked about the company. Now let's talk about you.

Because in addition to the structural causes, there are concrete behaviors, almost always well-intentioned, that a leader repeats without realizing they are feeding the isolation between areas:


  • Protecting your team from what other areas ask for. It comes from looking after your people's workload, but it ends up teaching them that what comes from outside is a threat, not a legitimate request.

  • Solving yourself what the teams should solve between themselves. It is faster, yes. And for that very reason, that direct channel between your people and the other area never gets built.

  • Celebrating only your own. Your area's achievements are shared behind closed doors, and those of the rest are barely mentioned.


None of the three is a flaw of character. They are reasonable responses to how the company is set up. It is just that, without realizing it, you repeat them every day.

How to start building collaboration from your position

You don't need a higher position or a mandate from above to get started. Some things can be worked on from where you are today.

First of all, align. This has two parts: naming a shared purpose that is bigger than your area (it can be customer focus, strengthening the brand, a culture of innovation) and, in parallel, investing in the relationship with the people on the other side. No project, team, or brand works better than the relationships that sustain it.

This is a first step, not the complete solution. It serves as a starting point until what has been agreed between areas is made explicit and holds over time, something we develop in more detail in our first article, on how to build working agreements that last over time.



When the silo can no longer be solved from the inside


Not all organizational silos require an external intervention. Some begin to disappear when teams improve their communication and sustain that effort over time. However, others are already held up by the company's own structure, beyond the goodwill of the people involved.

The clearest sign is that the same problem repeats itself again and again. Meetings are held, changes are agreed, and shortly afterward everything goes back to the way it was because the cause was never resolved.

At that point, an outside perspective can make the difference. Not to point out who is to blame, but to identify where coordination between areas breaks down and help redesign the way they work together.


The next step

If while reading this article you identified some of these situations in your organization, the problem probably lies not in the people, but in the way the areas are coordinating their work. The good news is that organizational silos can be prevented and corrected when their causes are identified.

At Endobrand we help leaders and teams detect the points where collaboration breaks down and design ways of working that allow better coordination between areas. If you want to explore what this process would look like in your organization, we would be delighted to talk with you.



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