Silo Working: The Good, the Bad, and the Fixable
Silo working gets a bad name, and often for good reason. It slows collaboration, duplicates effort, blocks information flow and erodes trust between teams.
But silos aren’t always the villain. Sometimes, they’re how organisations protect intellectual property. Sometimes, they’re how specialists focus deeply, or how a fast-moving team shields itself from endless noise. The real issue isn’t whether silos exist, it’s whether they’re serving or stalling the organisation’s goals.
So, what is silo working?
At its simplest, it’s when teams, functions or departments work in isolation, often with their own priorities, processes and culture. They’re focused inward, communication is limited and interdependence is low, even when it should be high.
It becomes a problem when teams start competing for the same resources or outcomes, when information is hoarded instead of shared, or when decisions get stuck at the handover points. You see the cracks in missed opportunities, clashing priorities, duplicated effort and eventually, the customer or client starts to feel it too. At the leadership level, silos tend to breed a quiet territorialism, where protecting the patch becomes more important than serving the whole.
But when does it help?
Not all separation is harmful. In fact, a degree of ringfencing is often essential. In R&D environments, for example, ideas need space to develop without dilution. In regulated sectors, you need to limit access to sensitive data. Innovation pods and start-up teams often need to move at a different pace to the rest of the business, and benefit from a sense of identity and protected focus. In high-pressure delivery environments, deep concentration can be more valuable than constant cross-functional updates.
The point is, silos aren’t always bad. But they should be intentional, not accidental.
What to do about it
At Amicus, we often work with leadership teams to explore one central question:
Are our structures designed for speed, focus and flow, or have we inherited accidental boundaries that no longer serve us?
Fixing the issue doesn’t always mean a reorg. In fact, most of the time it’s about shifting focus, not structure. It’s about reconnecting teams around shared outcomes, strengthening horizontal relationships, making accountability work across functions, not just within them, and making sure leaders know how to lead beyond the limits of their own teams — not simply manage what’s in front of them.
It also means making collaboration part of what gets rewarded, not just delivery in isolation. When leaders role model that, silos become less about walls and more about useful containers for focused, high-performing work. Leadership isn’t about tearing down every wall. It’s about knowing which ones are load-bearing, and which ones are just in the way.