You’ve probably heard it in a meeting. Some executive leans over their expensive mahogany desk or stares into a grainy Zoom camera and sighs about "breaking down silos." It sounds like corporate jargon. It sounds like something you’d hear in a barn. But in the world of business, what is meant by silos isn't about grain storage—it’s about the invisible walls that stop information from moving.
Silos happen when a department, a team, or even just one guy named Dave, decides to hoard data like it’s a precious metal.
Honestly, it’s a mess.
When people ask what is meant by silos, they are usually talking about a lack of communication. Imagine the marketing team spent three months and fifty grand on a campaign for a product that the engineering team canceled two weeks ago. That’s a silo. The left hand doesn’t just ignore the right hand; it doesn't even know the right hand exists.
The Anatomy of a Silo (and Why They Form)
Nobody wakes up and says, "I’m going to make this company less efficient today." Silos are accidental. They grow like weeds.
Usually, it starts with specialized knowledge. If you're a coder, you speak Python. If you're in accounting, you speak GAAP. These two groups have different goals, different software, and different bosses. Over time, they stop trying to translate for each other. They retreat into their own comfortable bubbles.
Psychologically, this is called "in-group bias." We like our tribe. We trust the people we sit next to (or Slack with) every day. Everyone else? They’re just "the people upstairs" who ask for reports and make our lives difficult.
Patrick Lencioni, who wrote The Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, argues that these barriers don't come from a lack of technology. They come from a lack of a common goal. If the sales team is rewarded only for volume and the customer success team is rewarded for retention, they are eventually going to fight. Sales will bring in terrible, low-quality leads to hit their numbers, and Customer Success will be left holding the bag.
It’s Not Just About Data
Most people think silos are a software problem. "If we just buy Salesforce," they say, "the silos will vanish."
They won't.
You can have the most integrated CRM in the history of the world, but if the Head of Product doesn’t like the Head of Sales, that data is staying locked away. A silo is a mindset. It’s a culture of "that’s not my job."
The Real-World Cost of Being Siloed
Let's look at Sony in the late 90s. This is the classic, textbook example of what is meant by silos. Sony was a giant. They had a portable music division, a computer division, and a record label. They had everything they needed to beat Apple to the punch.
But they didn't.
Because their divisions were so siloed, they actually released two different digital music players at the same time. Both were incompatible with each other. They were competing against themselves while Steve Jobs was in a garage—okay, maybe not a garage by then—planning the iPod. Sony’s internal walls were so thick that the different teams couldn't agree on a digital rights management (DRM) strategy. They were so busy protecting their own turf that they let an outsider steal the entire market.
That’s the danger.
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Silos kill innovation because innovation requires different ideas to collide. When ideas are kept in separate rooms, they just get stale. You end up with "groupthink," where everyone in the room agrees because they all have the same background and the same blind spots.
How to Spot a Silo Before It Ends You
You might think your company is "flat" or "collaborative." You might have beanbags in the breakroom. Doesn't matter. Silos are sneaky.
Look for these signs:
- Redundant Work: You find out two different teams are paying for the same software subscription. Or worse, two people are writing the same report.
- The "Us vs. Them" Language: Listen to how people talk in the cafeteria. Do they say "the developers" or "the suits" or "those guys in HR"?
- Hidden Calendars: If you can’t see what another team is working on, or if their projects are a "surprise" when they launch, you've got a silo problem.
- Information Gatekeeping: Does one person hold all the keys to a specific process? If that person goes on vacation and everything stops, that's a silo of one.
Breaking the Walls Without Breaking the People
So, how do you actually fix this? You can't just tell people to "collaborate more." That’s like telling a depressed person to "be happy." It’s useless.
First, you need a Rallying Cry. This is what Lencioni suggests. You need a single, thematic goal that everyone in the company—from the janitor to the CEO—understands is the priority for the next six months. If the goal is "Launch the New App," then the accounting team needs to know how their work supports that launch. If they don't see the connection, they'll go back to their silo.
Second, you have to change the Incentive Structure. If you want teams to work together, you have to pay them to work together. If bonuses are tied strictly to departmental KPIs, you are literally subsidizing silos. Start rewarding cross-functional projects.
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Third, Force the Interaction. Don’t just have meetings. Create "Tiger Teams" or "Squads" (Spotify uses this model) where you pull one person from marketing, one from dev, and one from design to work on a single product. When they sit together and share a common "enemy" (the deadline), the silo walls start to crumble.
The Downside of Transparency
Wait, there’s a catch. You can’t just open every document to everyone.
"Information overload" is the cousin of the silo. If I’m in HR, I don’t need to see the raw code for the website's backend. That’s just noise. The goal isn't to make everyone know everything. The goal is to make sure the right information is available to the right people at the right time.
It’s about "permeable membranes," not total exposure.
Why Silos Still Exist in 2026
Even with all our AI tools and Slack integrations, silos are worse than ever in the remote-work era. In an office, you might overhear a conversation at the coffee machine that saves you three days of work. On Zoom? Everything is scheduled. Everything is a "meeting."
There is no serendipity.
Remote work has made us more efficient at our specific tasks but worse at understanding the big picture. We’ve become digital hermits. We complete our Jira tickets and we close our laptops.
To combat this, companies are now hiring "Chief People Officers" or "Internal Communications Leads" whose entire job is just to make sure people are talking. It sounds crazy that you have to pay someone six figures to facilitate a conversation, but the cost of not doing it is much higher.
Practical Steps to Desilo Your Life
If you’re a manager or even just an employee who’s tired of the mess, you can start today.
- The Coffee Roulette: Reach out to one person in a department you never talk to. Ask them what their biggest headache is. You’ll be shocked how often you could actually help them (or how they are causing your biggest headache).
- Audit Your Meetings: Invite one person from an "outside" department to your weekly sync. Just to listen. Ask them at the end, "Does anything we said sound like a bad idea to you?"
- Shared Dashboards: Stop hiding your metrics. Put them on a screen where everyone can see them. When people see how their work moves the needle for someone else, they start to care.
- Kill the Jargon: If you're explaining something to a different team, talk like a human. If they don't understand what you do, they won't value what you do.
Silos are the natural state of any growing organization. Complexity breeds isolation. But if you understand what is meant by silos, you can at least see the walls as they are being built. You can’t ever fully get rid of them—specialization is necessary for high-level work—but you can make sure there are enough doors and windows to keep the air moving.
Go talk to Dave in accounting. He probably has the data you’ve been looking for all week.
Next Steps for Implementation:
- Identify the two departments in your company with the most friction and schedule a "pain point swap" session.
- Review your current KPI list to ensure at least 20% of goals are dependent on cross-departmental cooperation.
- Standardize your data reporting tools so that Marketing and Sales are looking at the same "source of truth" rather than two different spreadsheets.