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Buyer Situation

Silos between departments or offices

Workshops that build trust and clear decision rights across silos. In-person, measured, and tied to specific cross-team conversations your leaders need.

Silos between departments or offices

Silos stay standing because two things keep going wrong at the same time: the handoffs are unclear, and the trust across the handoff is low. Either one alone is survivable. Together they produce a team that holds endless meetings and still misses the shared decision. Kestryl Edge runs in-person workshops that give your leaders the specific moves to fix both at once, measured across the next quarter so you can see the collaboration pattern actually change.

Who this is for

  • Two departments that have to work together and don't, and every attempt at a joint meeting has made it worse.
  • A multi-office team where decisions keep looping because nobody trusts the version from the other office.
  • A newly combined team after an acquisition where the two sides still think of themselves as the two sides.

Who this isn't for: a team where one leader is actively undermining the other. The workshop is one of the moves; it isn't the only move. If that's your situation, call us before you book. We'll help you think about sequence.

Why cross-functional training usually fails

Most cross-functional workshops are team-building exercises wearing a workshop's clothes. People come in friendly, leave friendly, and the handoff still breaks the next week. The reason is that the exercises don't change the two underlying mechanics: decision rights and trust.

Decision rights are a design problem. Who decides, who's consulted, who's informed, and who gets to overrule. See the field guide on project alignment for the shape of this conversation.

Trust is a behavior problem. People trust each other across silos the same way they trust each other within them: by seeing each other handle a hard moment honestly. The field guide on mediating conflict covers the question shape.

What a workshop builds

Every leader of a silo is on a kind of hero's journey too: they went deep in their function, learned the craft, and now have to collaborate across a boundary that doesn't share their vocabulary. We make the mentoring across that boundary explicit.

Three capabilities decide whether the silos stay or stop.

Clear decision rights that people actually believe. Not an RACI chart. A short, specific agreement across the two sides about who decides, who's consulted, and what happens when the two of you disagree. We write it with the group in the room.

Shared context before the meeting. Most silo meetings fail because the two sides walk in with different facts. We teach a short pre-meeting shape that cuts the first 30 minutes of every joint meeting after it.

Trust across the handoff. Research on distributed teams gives us the shape here. We practice the specific moves that build cross-boundary trust: how to raise cross-team risk early, how to repair a dropped handoff, how to run a joint retrospective without blame.

How a workshop works

Three stages, measured end to end:

  1. The Leadership Baseline. Before the workshop, we measure collaboration behaviors across your silos: how often leaders raise cross-team risk, how often decisions get re-made, where the trust actually sits. This becomes Phase One of the engagement.
  2. The workshop. In person, with leaders from each silo in the same room. Short research-backed inputs, then live practice: the hard decision across teams, the dropped handoff, the joint retrospective. Light on slides, heavy on reps.
  3. The measurement loop. We re-measure right after, at three months, and at six months. The report shows cross-team behavior change, not just satisfaction scores.

Pricing gets scoped on the fit call. Team size, format, and whether your silos are in one building or seven drive it.

What people have said

"Dan led an awesome workshop at my company. We have two very different departments working on the same floor. Coming together to run through the exercises in a structured and open way created real clarity and understanding." - Morgan Zack

"If you want the real deal in EQ and leadership development that isn't run of the mill, you need to call them." - Lindsey Kay

What to do next

Book a 20-minute fit call. Bring one specific handoff that keeps breaking. We'll walk through the two sides, what you've tried, and whether a workshop is the right next step. If it isn't, we'll tell you.

FAQ

Is this really about culture or about process?
Both. Silos survive because the handoffs are unclear and the trust across the handoff is low. We teach the specific moves that fix both at once: shared working agreements, decision rights people actually believe, and the right questions in the first cross-team meeting.
Can this work across offices and time zones?
Yes. We've worked with distributed teams. The exercises change shape; the research-backed behaviors don't.
What if the two sides have been fighting for years?
Call us. We've seen that version. The workshop is one of the moves; it isn't the only move. Sometimes the honest first step is a mediation, not a workshop.
How do you measure a silo?
We measure cross-team collaboration behaviors: how often leaders raise cross-team risk, how often shared handoffs get renegotiated, how often decisions require a re-decision. The Leadership Baseline captures where you are before; the three-month and six-month re-measurements show what moved.
Does this work with a small cross-functional group, say five or six leaders?
Yes. In fact, five or six leaders in the same room, each from a different silo, is often the right starting size. Formats below a full workshop exist. We'll scope it on the call.

Related reading

Twenty minutes. We will tell you if a workshop is the right next step for your team.

Book a 20-minute fit call