Written by Head of Marketing Josh Trebilcock
Every leader knows the feeling.
You’ve got talented teams, a clear strategy and you might be making progress – yet somehow, progress feels slower than it should. Priorities begin to compete. Departments pull in slightly different directions. Conversations aren’t joining up. Things start to fall through the cracks. A noticeable performance gap opens up between the potential you see and the reality of where you are.
It’s not that people aren’t working hard. It’s that they’re working differently. You’re likely not facing a capability problem – you’re feeling the drag of organisational silos.
Silos can quietly erode speed, trust, and innovation. They turn collective strength into scattered effort. And left unchecked, they can take even the strongest strategy and slow it to a crawl.
But when you break them down – when teams start thinking, deciding and acting in unison – performance accelerates to a level greater than the sum of its parts.
That doesn’t come easily. Read on to find our latest guidance on to help you break down silos in your organisation.
The Executive Team’s Role in Breaking Down Silos
Breaking down silos doesn’t need to start with a restructure. In our experience it’s helpful to start by making sure there is strong alignment from the top.
We often ask executive teams three simple questions:
- How often does your executive team truly emulate “country over club” thinking?
- When was the last time you prioritised what was right for the organisation over what was best for your function?
- How consistently do you have the tough, unfiltered conversations true alignment demands?
For some leaders, those questions hit a nerve. It’s not that they don’t want to think collectively – it’s that staying aligned is hard when it actually comes to seeing it through. Because getting it right means thinking and behaving differently. It might require fronting up to uncomfortable truths, or leaning into tougher conversations that are easier not to have, or managing difficult team dynamics (and/or egos!). Competing priorities, functional pressures, and the daily demands of growth can conspire to pull even the best teams apart.
As we explored in How Winning Executive Teams Stay Aligned and Focused, the best-performing exec teams create a rhythm of clarity and connection. They don’t just meet and nod heads; they have the tough conversations. They go deeper. They share responsibility for “how the boat rows,” not just their individual oars.
That takes discipline to make it happen – and quite often courage to speak up.
Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, puts it simply:
Great executive teams don’t avoid tension; they use it. They know that healthy conflict, held in service of a shared goal, strengthens cohesion rather than weakens it.
Why Cross-Functional Thinking Is So Hard
Silos can form naturally as organisations grow and specialise. In some cases it can be a symptom of growth.
They can often happen even with best intentions; Sales focuses on the customer. Operations on delivery. Finance on control. All of that focus can indicate that people are engaged and may well be working hard. However, the danger comes when those functions optimise for their own success and in isolation, rather than the success of the whole.
As one global CEO told us recently:
Strong individual functions can still create a weak organisation if they’re not pulling together.
Silos are not the enemy; unmanaged silos are.
The challenge for leaders is to bridge the space between – creating an organisation that behaves like a single crew, not a collection of departments.
It’s something we’ve seen across many of the teams we’ve worked with. In the next section we’ll take a look at how this can look in practice with insights from some of our client work, before unpacking key takeaways:
1. Henkel – From Regional Fragmentation to Shared Focus
Henkel’s regional leadership teams each had their own strategy cycles – smart people, good plans, but struggled with cross-regional coherence. Teams were working hard within their own markets, yet missing the shared rhythm that builds scale.
By introducing a single “Crazy Goal” across the UK, German-Swiss and Nordic regions, Henkel aligned every leadership team and project group around one clear performance ambition. Shared metrics, common language, and ambassador networks replaced disconnected local priorities.
Result: Cross-functional collaboration surged, the leadership team grew 21% better at prioritising what mattered most, and the business saw +5% GP growth in 2023.
2. Armstrong Watson – Breaking Silos to Deliver a Joined-Up Client Service
As Armstrong Watson expanded through acquisitions, its service lines began to operate as separate islands. Accountancy, advisory, and legal teams each focused on their own excellence – but to a client the experience wasn’t seamless.
Through their tailored Crazy Goal Programme, the firm defined a unifying ambition –“to be the best accounting and financial advisory firm to deal with in the UK.” This simple north star reframed how success was measured, aligning every function behind the same customer outcome.
Result: 35% improvement in team working and a 30% uplift in client service quality -with teams now making decisions in service of one shared goal, not individual silos.
3. Glasswall – Turning Technical Teams into One High-Performance System
In cybersecurity, Glasswall’s rapid growth had created an Executive Leadership Team of talented specialists – but without a unified definition of success. Technical, finance, and product functions were all pulling hard, just not together. By bringing the ELT into one shared “Crazy Goal” and layering it through every function, the team built clarity on what winning looked like and how each team contributed to it. This transformed how decisions were made and how information flowed.
Result: a 35% increase in effective team working, 19% stronger internal communication, and 2.3× annual revenue growth – all driven by alignment, not restructure.
Five Ways to Break Down Silos
With the above client work in mind, we’ve pulled together 5 tips for leaders to break down siloes in their companies:
1. Lead the System, Not the Seat
The best leaders think beyond their function. They model company-wide thinking – making decisions for the good of the business, not the boundaries of their role.
Ask yourself: Are we acting as a leadership team, or as a team of leaders?
2. Reconnect Everyone to the Gold Medal Goal
Just like Co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis’s crew, every business needs a shared “gold medal” goal – the ambition that unites every function. When your teams understand how their daily work adds speed to the same boat, collaboration becomes instinctive. When you notice priorities competing, bring it back to your goal and what you are all trying to achieve – your North star. Let your goal be the guide – and remember to reiterate it when the pressure’s on and there may be disagreement.
3. Make Interdependence Visible
Breaking silos requires more than goodwill – it needs visibility. Shared metrics, cross-functional projects, and “Evidence Walls” where teams showcase progress toward common goals all reinforce collective accountability. When you celebrate joint wins, you remind everyone that success is shared. Evidence walls are something we frequently run with clients to remind them and their teams of key milestones or results they have had en route to their goal.
4. Create Cross-Functional Team Rules of the Game
At Lucerne, Ben’s crew formalised “Team Rules” – their agreed ways of working, the behaviours that got the best out of themselves as a crew. It acted as a living and breathing articulation to guide to how they made the boat go faster.
In business, we help executive teams to do the same: decide how they’ll collaborate, call out misalignment, and hold each other accountable.
Team Rules didn’t restrict them; it synchronised them at their best.
→ Read more: Developing Clear Ways of Working That Enable People To Be Successful
5. Celebrate Company Wins
Leaders often praise high-performing teams but forget to spotlight high-performing collaboration.
Recognise examples where departments solved a problem together, not apart. Reward those who act for the greater good – the ones who make the whole boat go faster. Try it for yourself – in the coming weeks, where can you proactively call out collaboration. Celebrating the behaviours you want to see can signpost to others of what you as a leader value and what they might in turn look to emulate.
Bringing It All Together
High-performing sports teams – from the All Blacks to F1 pit crews – share one truth: their edge lies in synchronisation. Every member knows their job, but they perform it in total awareness of everyone else’s.
In business, the same rhythm matters. The best companies move like a crew – aware, responsive, and united.
When executives lead from the system, create clarity, and hold healthy tension in service of a shared goal, the ripple effect travels through the whole organisation.
Because when the rhythm is right at the top, the rest of the organisation can find its drumbeat.
Final Thought
Silos are inevitable. Staying siloed is a choice.
Executive teams who take responsibility for alignment – who build trust, rhythm, and shared accountability across their top teams – create organisations that move with one heartbeat, one rhythm, one focus. This is easier said than done. It’s not something a meeting once a month can build and solve for, it’s about fundamentally rewiring how your senior team operates.
And when your executive team rows together, the boat goes faster.
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, we work with senior teams to surface the unseen dynamics that shape every decision. We help them build alignment, trust and the rhythm of collaboration that drives lasting performance. Ready for transformational over transactional? If your teams are pulling in different directions, speak to us about our High-Performing Team Programmes and start building a unified crew today.
