Silos despite all the meetings: a diagnosis.
Why more coordination doesn't add up to more alignment. A pattern from 60+ leadership teams in the German-speaking Mittelstand.
The diagnosis shows up in almost every other first conversation: “We don’t have silos, we have too many silos.” Translation: the leadership team meets often, at length, on a regular cadence, and still every function pulls in a different direction.
The symptom
Plenty of calls. Calendars full. Clean notes. And yet: Sales promises what Operations can’t deliver. Marketing scales a message Product won’t stand behind. Finance plans a quarter no one actually carries operationally.
The usual response
A new meeting. A new steering committee. A better agenda. A different facilitator. It works for six weeks, then the same picture returns.
The real cause
Alignment isn’t a state you can force through frequency. Alignment comes from clarity about trade-offs. As long as the leadership team won’t name explicitly what it is not doing, every function keeps defending its own definition of “and”.
Three tools that work
- Trade-off sentences: Three sentences per quarter, in the form “We do X because we’re giving up Y.”
- An owner per lever: no steering group, no committee: one person.
- 30-day reviews: small, fast, one question: is it working?
That’s exactly where sparring comes in: not another facilitator, but someone who says out loud the trade-offs the team keeps circling.
The pattern is old. The tools are unremarkable. The discipline is rare.