Look around any office—or any Slack channel, for that matter—and you’ll see it. Every department is running at a hundred miles an hour, but they’re all running in different directions. Marketing has a vision. Engineering has a roadmap. Sales has a quota. Everyone is operating each of their own, convinced that their silo is the one that really keeps the lights on.
It’s messy.
When individuals or departments prioritize their specific goals without a unifying thread, you don't get a sleek machine. You get a collection of parts that don't fit together. Think of it like a band where the drummer is playing jazz, the guitarist is shredding heavy metal, and the singer is doing folk. Individually? They might be talented. Together? It’s just noise. This "each of their own" mentality is often the silent killer of scaling companies. It feels like autonomy, but it's actually fragmentation.
The High Cost of the Silo Mentality
Most leaders mistake silence for productivity. They think because they aren't hearing complaints, everything is fine. But when teams function each of their own, you're paying a massive "inconsistency tax."
Take the case of a mid-sized SaaS company I consulted for last year. Their customer success team was promising features that the product team had already deprecated. Why? Because they were working in a vacuum. The CS team had their own metrics—retention at any cost—while the product team was focused on technical debt. Because they were operating each of their own, they were essentially sabotaging the company's long-term reputation to hit short-term departmental goals.
It's not just about missed deadlines. It’s about the mental load on your employees. When there is no central "source of truth," people spend half their day just trying to figure out what the other teams are doing. Research from the Harvard Business Review has shown that siloed organizations see a significant drop in innovation because the best ideas usually happen at the intersection of different disciplines. If everyone stays in their lane, those intersections never happen.
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Why We Fall Into the Trap
Honestly, it’s human nature. We like our tribes. We like the people who speak our language. A developer feels comfortable with other developers. They have their own jargon, their own Jira boards, their own "each of their own" culture.
It’s easier to manage a small, homogenous group than it is to coordinate a massive, cross-functional project. But "easy" is the enemy of growth. When you allow these micro-cultures to become more important than the company mission, you’ve lost. You end up with a "us vs. them" dynamic between departments. You’ve probably heard it: "Marketing sends us garbage leads," or "Engineering never builds what the customers actually want." That’s the sound of a company dying from the inside out.
Breaking the Cycle: From "Each of Their Own" to Collective Impact
So, how do you stop the rot? You can’t just tell people to "collaborate more." That’s corporate fluff. You need to change the structural incentives that make people retreat into their silos.
- Shared Incentives. If the sales team is only paid on new contracts, they will sell things the company can't deliver. If you tie a portion of their bonus to long-term customer retention—a metric shared with the Success team—suddenly they care very much about what the other side is doing.
- The "Tour of Duty" Concept. Companies like LinkedIn have experimented with this. Let your marketers sit in on engineering sprints. Have your developers spend a day listening to sales calls. It breaks the "each of their own" bubble by forcing people to see the world through a different lens.
- Radical Transparency. If your data is locked in departmental vaults, you're toast. You need a centralized dashboard where everyone can see the same KPIs. No gatekeeping.
The Problem With Modern Productivity Tools
Software was supposed to fix this, right? Slack, Asana, Monday.com—they all promised a connected workplace. But in many ways, they've made the each of their own problem worse.
Think about it. Each team now has its own private Slack channels. They have their own custom-built boards that no one else understands. We've just digitized the silos. We haven't actually broken them down. Tools are only as good as the culture using them. If your culture rewards individual heroics over team success, your tools will reflect that.
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Acknowledging the Nuance: Is Autonomy Ever Good?
I’m not saying you should micro-manage. There is a very thin line between "alignment" and "smothering." You want teams to have a sense of ownership. You want them to feel like they have a stake in their specific craft.
The goal isn't to turn everyone into a generalist. You still need specialists. You still need people who are masters of their specific domain. The trick is ensuring that while they work each of their own tasks, they are doing so with an awareness of the broader context.
Amazon’s "Two-Pizza Team" rule is a famous example of this. The teams are small and autonomous, but they are held to incredibly strict standards of how their output interfaces with the rest of the company. They have the freedom to build how they want, as long as the "handshake" with the next team is seamless.
Actionable Steps for Tomorrow Morning
If you suspect your organization is suffering from this fragmentation, don't wait for the next quarterly meeting. Start small.
Audit your meetings. Are they all departmental? If you don't have a recurring cross-functional meeting where the only goal is to surface dependencies, start one.
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Review your documentation. If a new hire started today, would they find five different versions of the company mission? If the answer is yes, you have an "each of their own" problem.
Kill the "Not My Job" attitude. This starts at the top. If a leader says, "That’s a Sales problem, I don't deal with that," the rest of the team will follow suit. You need to model the behavior of looking across the fence.
Standardize the language. Get everyone using the same terminology. If "Success" means one thing to Product and another thing to Finance, you're speaking two different languages. Sit down and define your core terms.
Stop letting your teams operate in the dark. The cost of doing things each of their own is simply too high in a market that moves this fast. Alignment isn't just a buzzword; it's a competitive advantage that your rivals are probably ignoring. Use that to your benefit.