Did you accidently create a team working in silos?

Sales hit its target and so did Ops. So why isn't the business moving any faster?

Sales promises a delivery date and Ops finds out about it the same way the client does, after it's already been communicated. Nobody did anything wrong here, and that's exactly the problem. The business loses days chasing a deadline that Ops never agreed to and never had the chance to push back on, because pushing back was never anyone's job, it was just friction that got absorbed somewhere down the line.

I see this constantly with leadership teams who are, individually, doing everything right. Everyone's hitting their targets and the business is still bleeding time in the gap between two people who technically never had to speak to each other to both be successful.

This is what working in silos actually looks like from the inside. It isn't two teams refusing to talk to one another. It's two teams whose plans were never properly joined up in the first place, so nobody can see the other's deadline coming until it's already landed. I wrote about this scenario in more detail on LinkedIn.

Most silo problems don't start with silo thinking. They start with an incentive structure that made complete sense when someone designed it, and a set of plans that were never actually one plan to begin with.

If someone's reward is tied entirely to finishing their own plan, then helping a colleague finish theirs is, mathematically, a cost. It takes time away from their own target for no return. You don't need anyone to be selfish for that to happen. You just need the incentive built that way, and most incentive structures are built exactly that way, because it's simpler to measure one person's output than to measure how well a whole team pulled together.

This is close to what Cohen and Bradford describe in Influence Without Authority, the idea that cooperation across a business rarely happens just because people are asked nicely, it happens when each side can see something of value coming back to them for the effort, a currency worth trading in. When a bonus structure gives someone nothing to trade for helping a colleague, you shouldn't be surprised when the help stops arriving.

But the incentive is only half the story. The other half is that most leadership teams are running individual plans that were never stitched together into one critical path, so nobody can see where their own deadline depends on someone else's until the dependency breaks. Sales can promise a date in good faith, because nothing in front of them shows that date depends on Ops finishing something first.

This is where Rob Cross's research on collaboration is worth sitting with. Cross and his colleagues have spent years mapping how much time knowledge workers now spend on collaborative activity, and the figure has grown enormously over the past couple of decades, to the point where most knowledge workers spend the majority of a typical week on email, in meetings and on the phone. What strikes me most about his work isn't the volume of time, it's that almost none of it shows up anywhere official. No dashboard tracks the hour someone spent unblocking a colleague's project instead of their own. It's real work, real cost, and it's completely invisible to the systems most businesses use to decide who gets rewarded, and just as invisible to a plan that was never built to show the connections between people's work in the first place.

I went further into this fix on LinkedIn.

Rebuilding the bonus alone won't solve this, and neither will rebuilding the plan alone. You need both. The incentive needs the group result sitting above the individual one, so that refusing to help a colleague starts costing you your own reward too. And the plan needs to become one shared critical path with joint goals along the way, rather than four separate plans that happen to sit inside the same business. Align the incentive perfectly and you can still have people tripping over dependencies nobody ever mapped. Map the dependencies perfectly and you can still have people deprioritising the joined-up work because their bonus doesn't care about it. Each fix props the other one up, and neither is much use on its own.

There's a third piece worth naming too, which is why silo behaviour so often gets left alone rather than challenged. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety points at exactly this, teams only surface the friction between departments when it feels genuinely safe to say the deadline that was promised was never actually agreed. Without that safety, Ops simply absorbs the friction and nobody upstream ever finds out there was a problem to fix.

I sat with a leader recently who'd just realised something uncomfortable. The bonus structure he'd built himself, that rewarded clear individual ownership, was the exact thing keeping his teams working in silos. Underneath that was something else too, four plans that had never actually been joined into one, so nobody could see where their piece of work depended on somebody else's.

He didn't get defensive about it, which is rarer than you'd think. Most leaders, shown their own system working against them, want to explain why it made sense at the time. He just sat with it for a minute and said something like, well, that explains a lot.

There's something oddly relieving about that moment, even though it doesn't feel like relief at first. It's not that the team is broken and that people don't care enough. It's that the thing built to reward good behaviour, and the plan built to organise the work, were both missing the same piece, a shared line running through all of it that everyone could actually see. It's a theme I keep coming back to in this work: check the system before you go looking for someone to blame. I shared this reflection in full on LinkedIn.

I think a lot of leaders are carrying some version of this, a system they're proud of and a plan they trust, both working against them in a way they haven't looked at closely enough yet.

What might your own plan be hiding, simply because nobody's ever laid it all out in one place?

If this struck a chord and you're wondering whether your own team's incentives are pulling in different directions, you can find out more about how I work with CEOs and MDs, or read more from the blog.

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs and MDs of growing businesses.