John Lewis
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Breaking Down Team Silos
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How Do You Break Down Silos Between Teams That Have to Work Together?
Yes — by giving two teams a shared, practical language for how they each work, before asking them to collaborate.
Silos don’t usually come from bad people.
They come from two teams who’ve never had a reason to understand how the other one works — until they do.
That’s exactly what happened at John Lewis. Not a falling out. Not a turf war. Just marketing and operations, sat side by side, quietly running on two completely different operating systems, with nobody ever stopping to compare notes.
It was the first time they’d done a day like this together.
Lots of new people. Two teams who worked side by side but had never really worked each other out.
Not because anyone had fallen out. Just because nobody had ever had a reason to sit down and ask: how do you actually work?
That’s the whole definition of a silo. Not conflict. Proximity without understanding
And the difference, once they saw it, was obvious.
The marketing team: more extroverted. A lot more Sunshine Yellow and Fiery Red — fast, expressive, driven by energy and people.
The operations team: much more Cool Blue. Considered, precise, driven by getting it right.
Neither team was wrong. But without a shared language for the difference, it’s easy to read “fast and expressive” as flaky, or “considered and precise” as slow. That’s how a silo hardens — not through one bad meeting, but through months of quietly misreading each other.
Here’s how the silo actually broke down.
“What that made them realise was that when they come together, there’s a need to play to each other’s strengths — as opposed to being fearful of each other, or maybe disrespectful of that opposite type.”
Not a restructure. Not a new reporting line. Just enough shared language that two teams stopped being wary of each other’s way of working, and started using it.
Because silos don’t hold still. They get tested every time something changes.
“Working in any business, the key word now is change. Understanding how our colours really help us to understand what we might be struggling with, how we can cope with it better, and how we can progress as individuals and as a team.”
A business that breaks down silos once still has to keep them down. A team that already understands how each person copes with change has a head start every single time the business asks them to change again.
The bit that stopped one manager in her tracks.
“The one direct report I had in the team — if you’d asked me to guess where she sat on the wheel, I would have guessed completely incorrectly. We are literally mirrors of each other, and I would never have guessed that.”
Years of working closely together. Still completely wrong about how similar they actually were. If a silo can form between a manager and her own direct report, it can form anywhere.
That single wrong guess is what led to the moment that mattered most:
“We were joking about the fact that we might need to hire people who are a little bit different from us. Maybe we have a tendency to hire on our own image.”
Silos don’t only form between departments. Sometimes a business quietly builds them in, one hire at a time.
It changed how people saw their own role too.
“It’s really given me a bit of insight now — is that maybe what I should be saying in my appraisals? Learning how to deal with different people, and how people should be dealing with me. It’s made me feel like maybe I should be preparing things a bit better for certain people.”
Not a personality test for its own sake. A practical shift in how to run appraisals, how to brief people, how to lead across the silo instead of just around it.
The line that summed it up.
“Understanding yourself is good for the soul. But I think it’s essential for progress and development.”
Good for the soul is a nice bonus. Breaking down the silo is the reason a business pays for it.
What this means if you’re the one deciding.
You don’t need a broken team for this to be worth doing. You need:
● Two or more teams who sit side by side, but not always in step — different working styles, no shared language for the difference yet
● A business asking people to change and adapt, repeatedly — because that’s most businesses, most of the time
● A willingness to look honestly at how you hire — silos don’t just form between teams, they form through who keeps getting recruited into them
If any of that sounds familiar, a single day like John Lewis’s is worth having.
This isn’t a one-off.
The same approach plays out differently depending on the organisation. See how a fast-growing company built a shared way of working from day one with Solventum, how a small charity made every hour count with Working Families, and how a global business moved faster after a major reorganisation with Heineken.
Ready to break down the silos in your own teams?
Book a call. We’ll talk about where the silos actually are, and what it would take to close them.