Your company may have a disease called “silos”

business partnering
Written By Christian Wattig

Here is what FP&A can do to treat it.

Silos appear when information doesn’t flow freely between teams or departments. The negative repercussions then start to appear quickly:

  • Less collaboration results in lower quality of decisions

  • Unhealthy relationships form between groups

  • Groups prioritize their own goals over higher-level company goals

Silos can accidentally occur when roles become more specialized, fewer people have cross-functional responsibilities, and leaders don’t consistently prioritize cross-department information sharing.

But silos may also be created on purpose. Departmental leaders may be concerned that increased transparency leads to unproductive discussions, resulting in delays. 

Or worse, “less qualified” teams influence decisions resulting in worse performance.

However, that fear is often unfounded. Sharing information with teams less involved in the details can lead to new ideas from looking at issues from a different perspective. In our fast-changing business environment, that can be what makes the difference between winning and losing. 

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These are 3 signs silos may be holding your company back:

  • Finance, FP&A, or Analytics teams don’t have access to all the business's data. If they ask for it, they receive responses like “That’s too detailed, don’t you only report high-level data?.” or “It’s easily misunderstood” or “Please explain why you need to see the data.” (which is difficult or impossible without analyzing it first.

  • “Reinvention of the wheel” phenomenon: you invest significant amounts of resources in fixing a problem, only to realize later that another team has already built the same solution.

  • “Not-invented-here” syndrome: department leaders are more critical of ideas originating from other teams than from their own, independent of merit. While this doesn’t mean silos exist yet, it likely leads to less information sharing in the future.

What can FP&A do to prevent silos from occurring and break down existing ones?

Set corporate goals

They must be FAST - Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific (which includes time-bound), and Transparent.


Break it down

Create departmental goals and transparency around interdependencies. Discuss what department A needs to do so that department B can achieve it’s goals.


Monitor progress

Each department needs to report the previous month's results and the forecast for the next month - shared with the entire executive team.

Christian Wattig
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