Amp It Up

8Teach Everyone to Go Direct and Build Mutual Trust

The Dangers of Silos

Years ago at ServiceNow, I was recruiting a high‐profile executive to be our VP of sales, or what we now call the chief revenue officer. During the interview I asked which team at his current company did he consider to be his primary team. Not surprisingly, his answer was his sales team. The answer I was hoping for, however, was his leadership peer group, meaning his counterparts in engineering, marketing, finance, services, and so on, because that's the team that really runs any company. The sales team by itself is a just one silo within the bigger organization.

Many companies are plagued by good execution within individual silos but terrible execution across silos. Everybody tries to stay within their own organizational lanes, including the leaders running those lanes. People get good at managing up and down the org chart of a single silo but flounder when problems require cooperation across silos. Whenever a problem cuts across departments, people flag it for the head of their own department and ask him or her to take it up with the heads of the other departments. This creates more work for everyone and turns department heads into messengers. It's a tremendous blow to efficiency.

Perhaps even worse, expecting everyone to stay in their silos enforces rigid power structures and encourages leaders to hoard power within their fiefdoms. These organizations tend to become very political, with those on top ...