How to Break Down Silos: The Cultural Root and the Real Cure

By Joe Newsum

In my years as a leader, a consultant, and a coach, I have come to believe that functions operating as silos are one of the largest unsolved problems in business. The cost is staggering, and almost none of it shows up where anyone can see it. There is no line on the income statement called the silo tax. But it is paid every single day, in duplicated work, in decisions made by political power instead of merit, in strategic initiatives that die quietly at the seams between functions, and in the slow grind of groups that should be working together working against each other instead.

The right word for it is negative synergy. Synergy is when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, when two plus two becomes five. Silos produce the opposite. The functions actively work against each other, so two plus two becomes two, or three. A company of strong functions pulling in different directions is routinely beaten by a company of ordinary functions pulling in the same one. Each function can be individually excellent and the organization still underperforms, because the energy is going into friction between the parts rather than force in a single direction.

There is a human cost underneath the financial one, and it is the part that is rarely named. The people who try to bridge the silos, who spend themselves working for the good of the whole company rather than the advancement of their own function, pay a personal tax for it. They are swimming against the current, because the default current of a siloed organization pulls everyone toward defending and expanding their own function. Over time the system quietly rewards the function-defenders and wears down the bridge-builders, and an organization can lose its most valuable people, the ones with the widest view and the deepest commitment to the whole, precisely because they were trying to do the right thing in a structure that made it exhausting.

Now imagine the inverse. Fix the silos, get every function swimming in the same direction, and the math flips. Negative synergy becomes positive synergy. The same people, the same budgets, the same functions stop canceling each other out and start to compound. Two plus two becomes five, or six, or more, because each function now makes the others better instead of fighting them. Speed increases. Efficiency increases. And the ability to drive strategic change, the most cross-functional thing any organization ever attempts and the first thing silos kill, increases manyfold. This is not a marginal improvement on top of removing the drag. It is a different category of performance.

So the question of how to break down silos is not a minor operational one. It is one of the highest-leverage problems a leader can solve. The trouble is that almost every common approach to it fails, because it misunderstands what a silo actually is.

Search how to break down silos and you will find the same advice everywhere. Communicate more. Set shared goals. Buy better collaboration tools. Run a cross-functional offsite. Reorganize the reporting lines. This advice is not wrong, exactly. It is just aimed at the symptom, which is why silos keep coming back no matter how many bridges you build over them. I tried most of these fixes myself as an executive. They helped for a quarter, and then the walls went back up. It took me a long time to understand why: the fixes were treating silos as a coordination problem, when silos are actually a cultural one.

Once you see silos through the lens of culture, both the cause and the cure become clear. This page lays out what a silo actually is beneath the surface, why the usual remedies fail, and the one approach that genuinely breaks them down and keeps them down.

What a Silo Actually Is

To break a silo you have to see what it actually is, underneath the missed handoffs and the turf wars. A silo is a cultural imbalance. It is what happens when the culture inside a function grows strong and the culture connecting the functions stays weak.

Every organization has two kinds of culture running at once. There is the culture inside each function, how sales does its work, how engineering does its work, how finance does its work. Call it the vertical, the functional culture. And there is the culture of how the whole organization works together across those functions, how meetings, decisions, handoffs, and communication happen between groups. Call it the horizontal, the cross-functional culture. You can see both at once in the Culture Matrix: functions across the top, the activities every group shares down the side.

Read the matrix down the columns and you see strong functional cultures, each function operating as its own coherent world. Read it across the rows and you see nothing holding the functions together. That is a silo. Not a weak organization. A collection of strong verticals with no strong horizontal. The functions are not broken. The connection between them was never built.

This is why strong functions are not the enemy. A function should have its own way of doing its work, its own standards, its own identity. The problem is never the strong vertical. It is the missing horizontal. Get this distinction wrong and you will try to fix silos by weakening the functions, which destroys the very thing that makes them good at their work.

Look at your own organization. Are the functions weak, or are they strong functions with nothing connecting them across? The answer changes everything about what you do next.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

Once you see a silo as a missing horizontal culture, it becomes clear why the standard remedies disappoint. Almost every one of them adds a layer of coordination on top of the weak horizontal, without ever building the horizontal itself.

None of these is useless. They are bridges, and a bridge can be genuinely helpful. But a bridge spans a gap without closing it. The moment the initiative loses momentum, the gap is still there and the walls return. To break a silo permanently you do not build a bridge over the gap. You build the horizontal culture that closes it.

The Zero-Sum Trap

There is a particular mindset that grows inside a silo, and it is worth naming because it hides so well. In a weak horizontal culture, even good leaders start to treat budget, headcount, and territory as a fixed pie, and their share of it as a measure of how much they matter. The game quietly becomes zero-sum. For my function to win, another has to lose.

I know the pull of it because I felt it. When you run a function, fighting for its budget and its people feels exactly like doing your job well. It does not feel like silo behavior. It feels like loyalty. That is what makes it so hard to see and so hard to call out. It is the silo wearing the mask of good leadership, and it is only possible because there is no shared standard for how functions are supposed to treat each other across the organization.

This is the deeper reason the horizontal culture matters. A strong cross-functional culture changes the game itself. When there is a shared, named commitment for how the whole organization works together, the zero-sum behavior finally becomes visible for what it is, because now it visibly breaks something everyone agreed to. You cannot name the toxicity until there is a commitment it violates. The horizontal culture is what gives everyone the standing to say, that is not how we work here.

Nowhere is this clearer than in how decisions get made. When there is no shared method for deciding across functions, every cross-functional decision becomes a contest of power rather than a search for the right answer, and a fixed-pie mindset turns each contest into a fight one function wins and another loses. A shared decision commitment, agreed in advance, replaces the power contest with a method everyone signed up to: how we weigh input, who holds the call, how we commit once the call is made. That single shift takes the most silo-hardening interaction in the organization and turns it into a silo-dissolving one.

Think about the last budget or headcount fight you watched. Were people defending the organization, or defending their function against the organization? And did anyone have the standing to name the difference?

The Real Cure: Build the Horizontal

If a silo is a strong vertical culture with a weak horizontal one, the cure is not to tear down the verticals. It is to build the horizontal. You break down silos by deliberately building a shared culture for how the whole organization works together across functions, the connective tissue the matrix is missing.

That shared culture is built the same way any deliberate culture is built, through commitments, the precise behavioral language that installs a shared way of thinking and acting in the moments that matter. Cross-functional commitments are the silo-breakers. They are the shared agreements for how any two functions run a joint meeting, make a joint decision, hand off work, give each other feedback, and resolve a disagreement. They run horizontally, across every column, and they connect the functions without erasing what makes each one distinct.

A function keeps its own strong culture for its own work. What changes is that now there is also a strong, shared culture for the seams where functions meet. Sales still sells the way sales sells. Finance still operates with its own rigor. But when they work together, they operate from a shared set of commitments that neither one gets to opt out of, because the whole organization made them together.

How Shared Language Dissolves the Contention

Here is the mechanism underneath the cure, and it is the reason commitments break silos when coordination alone never does. Most cross-functional contention is not actually a disagreement about the goal. It is two functions running different mental models of how the work should happen, colliding at the seam. Sales and finance usually want the same outcome. They fight because they think about decisions, risk, and time in fundamentally different ways, and neither one can see the other’s model.

When functions adopt shared commitments, they start using the same language for the cross-functional domains. And shared language does something coordination cannot: it produces shared thinking. As two functions use the same words for how a decision gets made, how work gets handed off, how a disagreement gets resolved, they stop just following the same process and start actually seeing the work the same way. The gap between their mental models closes.

And when the mental models converge, the contention drops, not because anyone forced agreement, but because the two groups genuinely see it the same way now. This is the difference between two people who agree to follow the same rule while still privately disagreeing, and two people who actually perceive the situation identically. The first is coordination, and it is fragile. The second is shared culture, and it is what dissolves the silo. The functions stop colliding because they have converged, not because they were told to get along.

This is the causal chain of culture applied to the seams between functions: shared language produces shared thinking, shared thinking produces aligned behavior, and aligned behavior is inherently less contentious than coordinated but divergent behavior. Build the shared language across the matrix and the walls do not just get bridged. They stop forming.

Where to Start

You do not break every silo at once, and you do not need a company-wide transformation to begin. But where you begin matters more than most leaders think, because the obvious answer is wrong.

The obvious answer is to start where the failure is most expensive. And the cost does concentrate in the high-stakes domains: cross-functional decisions that stall or get made by power, budget cycles that turn into turf wars, metrics that put functions at war. That is where the prize is. It is not where you start, because cost and buildability run in opposite directions. The domains where silos are most expensive are also the most political, the most zero-sum, and the most trust-dependent. Ask two functions that distrust each other to first rebuild how budget gets divided, and the new commitment becomes one more thing to fight over. You are asking for the hardest act of trust from people with none banked.

So you start where culture is actually practiced: the everyday domains. Communication and collaboration are where the functions meet constantly, and frequency is everything, because culture forms through repetition. A commitment lived hourly becomes culture in weeks. A commitment lived once a quarter takes years. Make the daily interactions across the seam feel different, cohesive, respectful, on the same team, and you have started breaking the silo before touching a single structural fight. Then you climb, in waves, as the cohesion compounds:

Find the two functions whose collision costs the organization the most. But do not start them on the budget fight. Start them on wave one at their seam: how they communicate, how their joint meetings run, how they show up on shared work. When the daily interactions feel cohesive, take on the concrete seams, and then, with trust banked, rebuild the power domains where the real money is. The sequence is the same whether the seam is two teams or two divisions.

Then let it spread. When one painful seam visibly improves because two functions built shared commitments for how they work together, other functions notice. The horizontal culture grows seam by seam, wave by wave, until the connective tissue runs across the whole matrix. That is how silos come down and stay down: not with a bridge built over the gap, but with a culture built across it.

Silos are the walls between functions. There is a second set of walls every organization builds, the ones between levels, and the same lens applies. Read next: Flat Organizational Culture. Or go straight to the architecture and start building: The Four Types of Commitments.