Bridging Silos Through Better Conversations

In my last article, I talked about a familiar pattern inside many organizations: we decide something big needs to change, and our first instinct is to target the culture. We point to sayings like “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and then immediately try to change the culture itself.

And somehow we’re surprised when that doesn’t work, or when it backfires.

We know culture is powerful, but we forget the source of that power is stability. Culture is one of the most stable, deeply rooted elements of any organization. It shifts, but it rarely shifts on command. Rather than attempting to change the culture directly, it’s far more effective to harness its power by aligning the change with our shared values.

A Leadership Team Facing a Familiar Challenge

Today, I want to talk about how a leadership team I worked with tapped into this insight to address a common organizational problem: working with silos.

A few years ago, I coached a leadership team responsible for about 500 employees and another 2,000 contractors. They sat within an even larger enterprise, yet even their function alone could have passed for a mid-sized business. Like many teams, they were wrestling with the usual frustrations of a siloed environment—slow decision-making, unclear visibility, and a lack of real collaboration across functions.

They thought they needed a different organizing structure to solve these problems—perhaps a new vocabulary for roles, rituals, or artifacts. But as we explored this together, a much simpler and more effective solution emerged.

Start With What’s Already Working

We began by naming what already worked well. They had a strong sense of shared purpose and agreed on their strategy. They were aligned on the contribution their function made to the wider organization. They genuinely respected one another and cared about the people they led. They were proud of the department culture they had nurtured over time.

Care was one of their core values—and importantly, it was something they already practiced consistently.

The Surprising Source of Friction

What they agreed needed improvement was surprisingly simple: their meetings.

They wanted clearer communication, more visibility into decisions, and faster alignment on shared priorities. They also shared something else: an almost universal desire to spend more time with their peers. Not in formal presentations, but in real conversations where they could understand each other’s pressures, priorities, and goals.

Small Shifts, Big Impact

So we made a few small, intentional changes—each one a natural extension of their existing culture of care. They reduced the amount of formal reporting time in their standing meetings. They replaced some of that time with regular one-to-one peer conversations: informal chats designed to build trust, surface issues early, and help them problem-solve together.

These tiny shifts created an outsized impact. Many of the “red tape” frustrations they’d been battling loosened almost immediately, simply because the leaders were talking to each other more often, more candidly, and with clearer intent.

Why Simple Is Not Naïve

It may sound overly simple, but simple doesn’t mean naïve. In fact, this kind of solution aligns perfectly with the Greiner model for organizational growth, which we explored recently in the Golden Bridge Collective. As organizations expand and mature, they move through distinct phases, each punctuated by a crisis that must be resolved in order to grow. At large scale, the crisis is often bureaucracy and red tape. The pathway through it is collaboration.

Collaboration Starts With Connection

Collaboration doesn’t always require a new org chart or a brand-new operating model. Sometimes it looks like a weekly coffee with a peer. Sometimes it looks like choosing relationships over reports.

When we let our shared purpose and values guide us—and when we intentionally strengthen the relationships inside and across silos—we often discover that many of the barriers we struggle with aren’t structural at all. They’re relational. And that means they’re changeable.

Another Way to Work With Culture

So when we begin to fret about culture eating our brand-new strategy for breakfast, maybe that’s our cue to pause and brew a fresh pot of coffee.

Nurture the relationships that make collaboration possible. As this leadership team discovered, that’s how change actually moves—one coffee chat at a time.