The reorg was approved before lunch. I was in the room as a coach rather than a decision maker, watching the leadership team of a mid-size software company sign off on a plan to break the org into cross-functional squads. Marketing, product, engineering, and support would finally sit in the same units and own their outcomes together. Everyone nodded. Good energy in the room. Then the afternoon session turned to headcount for the next two quarters, and the same people who had endorsed shared ownership before lunch spent three hours defending their own function's number, one leader at a time, each pitch built to protect a team rather than the plan they had all agreed to that morning.

Not one of them would have described themselves as siloed. They were the people assigning the cure. What was visible from the side of the table was that this executive team was the least collaborative group in the whole company, and it was busy designing collaboration for everyone three levels down.

We usually go looking for silos in the middle. We picture the turf-guarding department head, or the team that hoards the data everyone downstream needs. Jacob Goldstein, who runs cross-functional leadership programs at a firm called The Leadership Laboratory and therefore has money riding on the diagnosis, made a more uncomfortable case in an April analysis. Silos are rational, and the ones that matter most live at the top.1 When a sales team is measured only on revenue and a product team only on feature velocity, and no shared number joins the two, cooperation becomes an act of personal goodwill instead of something the structure actually asks for. People are not being intentionally difficult, they are just reading their incentives correctly.

None of this is a secret to the people it describes. Ask executives and most will tell you the silos are real and that they drain results. Awareness was never the gap. The people at the top can see the problem plainly and preside over it anyway.

Why the top team is the hardest one to fix

There is a reason this calcifies at the executive layer specifically. A leadership team is supposed to be a team, yet it rarely behaves like one. Korn Ferry, another outfit with skin in this game, found that only 21 percent of top teams rated as outstanding, while 79 percent came in mediocre or poor.2 The talent in those rooms is real, but the collective output runs thinner than the resumes would predict. It tends to stay thin because conditions at the top punish the very behaviors that collaboration depends on.

Think about what cross-functional work asks of a senior leader. You have to say out loud that you do not know something. You have to let a peer carry a piece of your own domain and trust they will not hold it against you in the next budget cycle. Those moves cost a junior engineer almost nothing and cost a chief officer a great deal, because the authority of the job rests on looking certain. Goldstein argues that the executive room is often the least safe place in the company to admit a gap, and that this comes with the seniority rather than in spite of it.1 So the VP of product and the VP of engineering meet mostly in conflict over resources, each performing confidence, and the organization beneath them copies the pattern with unnerving accuracy.

You cannot restructure your way out of a silo that was built by behavior. Redraw the boxes all you like, and the handoff gaps come back six months later wearing slightly different clothes.

This is the part most silo-breaking initiatives step right over. A new structure gets announced, squads get named, a collaboration platform gets purchased, and the coordination failures return in different packaging. The intervention aimed at the boxes and the reporting lines, but the behavior at the top never moved, so the permission never moved, and permission is the thing that actually travels downward through a company. People watch what their leaders do in a resource fight far more closely than they read the values painted on the lobby wall.

What the people below already know

I spent years as an agile coach installing cross-functional teams inside companies whose leadership teams were, themselves, the most functionally divided group on the premises. The teams down the org chart would form up, learn to share ownership, start producing real work together, and then hit an invisible ceiling the moment an initiative needed two executives to genuinely cooperate rather than negotiate. The energy died in that gap every time. The frontline had plenty of will. What it had also learned, correctly, was what the top team modeled: that when it counts, you protect your own.

Years earlier I had watched the reverse, and it stuck with me. In a Navy intelligence operation, a small group of civilian contractors took a combat zone from more than eight hundred hostile incidents a month down to under fifty within a year, and they did it by pushing accountability outward instead of letting it pool at the top. That story anchors a chapter in the book I wrote with James Wright, Agile Sucks (When You Do It Wrong), which spends most of its pages on what breaks when the people at the top keep accountability for themselves instead of handing it down. Shared ownership turns out to be a leadership behavior long before it is a process anyone can install.

If you sit on one of these teams, the honest first question is not which structure to roll out next. It is this one. In the last real resource fight your leadership team had, did you model the collaboration you keep asking three levels down to perform, or did you defend your number and call it discipline? The squads will only ever be as cross-functional as the room that designed them. So before the next reorg lands, it is worth asking which of your silos your own leadership team is teaching everyone else to keep.