Somewhere in most organisations, right now, a senior leader is telling two teams to break down the silos between them. It is one of the most repeated instructions in corporate life, raised at leadership conferences, in quarterly business reviews, and again at the next functional leader forum when the same two teams still are not working well together. I hear it constantly from CEOs, COOs, CHROs and chiefs of staff, and I think it is one of the least actionable instructions a leader can give, not because it is wrong about the problem, but because it names the wrong thing. Breaking down silos between teams sounds like a fix. It is a description dressed as a plan.
I want to make a specific, contrarian case here: silos are not the problem. The problem is the seam, the exact point where work passes from one team to another, and almost nobody owns it. That is the ownership pattern I set out in full in my work on why cross-functional work stalls. This piece stays on the seam.
How Do You Break Down Silos Between Teams, and Is That Even the Right Goal?
Start with what the instruction actually asks people to do. Break down the silos. Into what? Merged reporting lines? Shared standups? Every version of “break down the silos” I have watched a leadership team attempt has produced more meetings and no change in the thing that was actually broken, a specific handover nobody was accountable for. You cannot break down a shape. You can only fix what is happening at its edges, and that means naming an owner for the edge, not dissolving the shape it belongs to.
If Silos Are Not the Problem, What Is?
Organisations build silos on purpose. They want deep expertise in finance, in operations, in technology, and they get it by letting specialists sit together, develop shared language, and build judgement that only comes from doing one thing repeatedly and well. Nobody I have worked with would trade that specialisation away if you offered it to them. The instinct to “break down the silos” quietly asks people to give up the depth the organisation paid years to build, and they resist it, correctly, because the depth was never the fault. What costs organisations time, money and trust is not specialised teams. It is what happens in the narrow space between them, where one team’s output becomes another team’s input and nobody has ever been named responsible for that transfer.
What Is an Organisational Seam, and How Do You Find the Ones That Are Costing You?
Researchers who study cross-team collaboration have made a similar point from a different angle, arguing that the real leadership work sits in the connective tissue between groups rather than inside any one of them (see the Harvard Business Review’s Cross-Silo Leadership research). An organisational seam is the specific point where accountability crosses a boundary: the moment a purchase order leaves procurement and becomes finance’s problem to reconcile, the moment a customer commitment leaves one team and becomes another team’s promise to keep. Seams are not visible on an org chart, because org charts describe teams, not handovers. You find the costly ones by asking a blunt question in any cross-functional review: when work crosses from this team to that one, who is accountable for what happens in the crossing itself, not for either side of it. In most organisations, the honest answer is nobody. Every task on either side of the seam has an owner. The seam does not. That is Ownership Fog: the condition where every task in a cross-functional initiative has a named owner and the outcome itself has none. Seams are where it lives most visibly.
Why Do Recurring Cross-Team Meetings Fail to Fix Handovers?
Here is a pattern I have seen enough times to treat as close to universal. Two teams are told they are not aligned. Someone, usually with good intentions, sets up a recurring meeting. Call it the weekly sync that replaced the decision. Twelve weeks in, the two teams know an enormous amount about each other’s work. Their language has softened, the relationship genuinely feels better. And the handover between them, the actual mechanical thing that was breaking, has not moved by a single step. Nothing in that meeting ever required a decision, because the meeting was never given the authority to change the handover, only to discuss it. It creates the feeling of progress, which is worse than no progress, because it uses up the organisation’s patience for fixing the seam without ever fixing it. Those two teams were never actually misaligned in the way the instruction assumed. The seam between them had no owner, and a meeting is not an owner.
Name an Owner for the Handover, Not a Meeting
My position is direct: you do not need to break down a silo, you need to name an owner for each seam between silos. Two teams can be as specialised, as protective of their expertise, as internally focused as they like, provided somebody is accountable for what happens at the point their work meets. That person does not run both teams. They own the transfer: the format the work arrives in, the timing it arrives on, what happens when it arrives incomplete, and who decides when the handover itself needs to change. This is a structural fix, not a cultural one, and it is worth being precise about that, because treating collaboration breakdown as a culture problem is exactly what produces another well-meaning conversation instead of a decision. Naming the seam owner is closer to the discipline in my piece on who should actually own outcomes that cross team lines, applied narrowly to the handover itself rather than to the whole initiative.
There is a reason an outside voice is often the fastest way to get this named. When one team raises the seam problem itself, it is heard, fairly or not, as blame directed at the other team, and the conversation stalls before anyone reaches the mechanics. When I stand in front of both teams at once as a keynote speaker for silos and collaboration, I am not carrying either team’s history, so I can name the seam as a structural gap rather than a character flaw, and both teams can hear it as the same true thing at the same time. If that is the moment you are standing in, my accountability and ownership keynote is built for exactly this conversation. This work sits inside the wider discipline I call cross-functional execution, which is Execution Intelligence™ applied to the handovers between teams: the gap between what organisations decide and what they actually do, and how leaders close it.
What Should Change at the Seam in the First 48 Hours?
This is where The First 48 Hours becomes useful, applied to one seam directly. A decision is only believed when something visibly stops, starts or changes in the first 48 hours after it is made. Pick the handover flagged as broken, say the point where a mismatched invoice moves from procurement to finance, and ask what changed in the 48 hours after the last time both teams agreed to fix it. Not what was discussed. Not what was agreed to look at again next quarter. What changed in the mechanics. Was a verification step removed from one side and added to the other. Was a trigger automated so the mismatch flags itself instead of waiting to be noticed. Was a form deleted because it duplicated one the other team already held. Was a wait that used to be invisible made visible on a shared board so both teams could see it stall. If the honest answer is that a fortnightly meeting got set up, the seam still has no owner, and it will look the same in a year, no matter how good the relationship between the two teams has become.
The Moment This Actually Matters
If you have just heard that two teams “are not aligned” and your instinct is to schedule another meeting, stop before you send the invite. Name who owns the seam instead, and ask them what changes in the handover in the next 48 hours. That single question will tell you more than a quarter of well-meaning meetings ever will. If you want an outside voice to make that case to both teams at once, without either one hearing it as blame, get in touch about a keynote and I will help you frame the conversation before it becomes another sync.
