Facilitating Knowledge Sharing Across Departments

In so many organisations, so many people have so many ideas, skills and knowledge sets that could be of incredible value but their voices so often go unheard, because they work in a team or department that isn’t leading on the challenge, or their job description is only accessing 10% of their experience, expertise and interest. It is why it is so important to get people to work across teams and to broker and to catalyse that. The U.S. military have liaison officers who facilitate communication between elements of the organisation to ensure mutual understanding and unity of purpose and action. Liaison is the most commonly employed technique for establishing and maintaining close, continuous, physical communication between commands. It ensures that leaders and teams have a real time awareness of talent and expertise, wherever it may be, so that it can be deployed quickly and with immediate impact. Maybe, create a centralised information centre, where people can see what is going on where in the organisation, and can contribute through online portals to offer support and ideas. Increasingly, organisations are holding hackathons, during working hours for people to meet in open spaces, shares ideas and challenges, in order to form working groups and focused teams. I often advise clients to build work exchanges into their professional development cycles, so that people get the chance to experience other roles and responsibilities within the organisation, not only to build empathy but to foster new relationships and opportunities for information and idea exchanges. Start to see roles as missions rather than fixed job descriptions, so that colleagues can move when appropriate but always have a home base to return to.   Make sure that leaders at all levels are not only held to account for planning, strategy, vision, culture and performance but for cross-team collaboration. It is too easy for leaders to role model the silo-ing and cross departmental blame shifting that can so easily poison an organisation’s collegiate potential.  

We talk a lot about breaking down silos between departments - but some of the most limiting silos form inside them. They’re harder to see and often invisible to the people inside them We tend to think of silos as something that happens between functions. But often, the siloing happens within them too. Even well-intentioned, capable teams can turn inward when: 🔸Workload keeps everyone focused on delivery, not connection. 🔸Priorities are set for individuals rather than for the collective - reinforcing silos instead of shared accountability. 🔸Performance systems reward individual delivery rather than collective results. You often see this in HR teams. Reward, L&D and People Operations are all working hard, but often to their own priorities, timelines and measures of success. Each part is coordinated within itself, yet the department as a whole struggles to move in one direction. The ultimate loser is the organisation - it doesn’t receive the seamless service it needs. Structures, reporting lines, and incentives all pull people inward. Gillian Tett in her excellent book The Silo Effect, described how silos often grow out of good intentions - focus, expertise, efficiency - yet become dangerous when people stop seeing how their work connects to the whole. Her research showed how even world-class organisations lose agility and innovation when knowledge and relationships stay trapped within boundaries. The move to better starts with how departments work as a whole: 🔹Information sharing – making progress and challenges visible beyond the team. 🔹Mutual consultation – seeking early input from others, not sign-off at the end. 🔹Joint planning and prioritisation – deciding together what really matters. 🔹Collective leadership and coordinated execution – operating as a cohesive unit that connects to the rest of the organisation. 🔹Creating “social bridges” across boundaries. creating cross-functional teams, shared projects, secondments, or physical spaces that bring different groups into contact Leaders have a critical role here - not by becoming arbiters between different parts of the team but by facilitating connection, clarity and rhythm, and putting the right governance structures in place so collaboration becomes routine Silos are an insidious part of organisational life, they creep in quietly and thrive in busy, well-intentioned environments. But with the right patterns, routines and leadership, they can be replaced by something far stronger: a network of teams acting as one connected system. It’s what Dani and I focus on when we support teams to unlock performance - helping them build the structures, relationships and disciplines that increase output, throughput, engagement and shared accountability. Do you ever see teams that are just as siloed on the inside as they are between departments?

Lean Community:  Knowledge-Sharing.  In The High-Velocity Edge, Steve Spear explores how top-performing organizations achieve continuous learning and improvement through deeply embedded knowledge-sharing mechanisms. High-velocity organizations—such as Toyota, Alcoa, and parts of the U.S. Navy—excel by creating environments where learning is constant, fast, and widely distributed. Highly Recommend ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ -------------------- Spear identifies four key capabilities enabling these organizations to prevent knowledge from being siloed and instead drive systemic learning: 🏆 Seeing Problems as They Occur:  High-velocity organizations empower employees at all levels to detect abnormalities immediately. This real-time problem identification ensures issues are visible and actionable rather than hidden or ignored. 🏆 Swarming and Solving Problems Immediately: Once problems are seen, teams swarm to resolve them collaboratively. This mechanism accelerates learning and ensures that solutions are shared widely, rather than hoarded by a few. 🏆 Spreading New Knowledge Rapidly: Companies like Toyota standardize successful solutions and disseminate them across the organization. This avoids reinvention and ensures best practices are embedded into processes. The use of common tools, shared language, and simple documentation supports this rapid transfer. 🏆 Leading by Teaching: Leaders in high-velocity organizations serve as coaches, reinforcing learning principles and modeling behavior that encourages inquiry and continuous improvement. They create a culture where asking questions, experimenting, and sharing results—both successes and failures—are expected and valued. To prevent knowledge from being siloed, these companies institutionalize learning into routines and structures, making it a core part of daily work. Continuous feedback loops, process transparency, and decentralized problem-solving all contribute to a culture of shared learning. Ultimately, The High-Velocity Edge illustrates that sustainable competitive advantage comes not from one-time innovation but from an organizational system that learns faster and spreads knowledge more effectively than the competition. -------------------- Questions: 1. Is a culture of decentralized problem-solving more effective than centralized expertise for sustained organizational learning? 2. Can standardized processes for sharing knowledge limit innovation by enforcing conformity? 3. How can organizations balance speed in knowledge dissemination with ensuring the accuracy and quality of the information being shared? Looking forward to your comments! https://a.co/d/gwIBSYD #ContinuousImprovement #CultureMatters

What can upper management do to enable a culture of collaboration—even in large projects with multiple teams and managers? Ever wondered how to make large, multi-team projects truly collaborative? In many organizations, a common challenge is ensuring that engineers feel empowered to contribute and learn across different parts of the same project. The good news? Leading companies are actively cultivating cultures that break down silos, fostering a much deeper understanding of the entire system. It’s about enabling engineers to see the bigger picture and contribute wherever their expertise is most valuable. Here are three powerful strategies that are gaining traction: 1. Implementing InnerSource Imagine applying open-source development practices within your company. Engineers are encouraged to contribute code, fix bugs, and propose enhancements to modules owned by other internal teams. This fosters shared ownership, promotes knowledge sharing, and builds a collective understanding of the codebase across the organization. It’s collaboration on a grand scale. 2. Organizing Around Value Streams or Features Instead of structuring teams purely by technical layers (e.g., frontend, configuration backend, observability GUI, observability backend, data plane, service plane), many networking and security companies now organize teams around end-to-end delivery of customer value or features. For example, you might see a dedicated Firewall Team, VPN Team, CASB Team, or DLP Team—each owning their feature across the stack, from UI and APIs to backend and data plane functions. This structure fosters holistic understanding and alignment within teams, ensuring that everyone grasps the full scope of a feature’s delivery. 3. Establishing Guilds or Communities of Practice (CoPs) These are groups of engineers from different teams who share a common interest or specialization (e.g., a “Cloud Security Guild” or a “Performance Optimization CoP”). They meet regularly to share knowledge, discuss best practices, and solve common challenges. CoPs transcend traditional team boundaries, enabling cross-pollination of ideas and continuous learning beyond the formal reporting structure. These approaches directly support the kind of system-wide thinking that’s crucial for effective debugging, resilient design, and growth into impactful architectural roles. They help engineers expand their horizons and take true ownership of the product’s success. #SoftwareEngineering #TeamCollaboration #InnerSource #DevOps #TechCulture #NetworkingSecurity #EngineeringLeadership #CareerGrowth #SystemDesign #Aryaka

Knowledge dies in silence. It grows when shared. McKinsey found that knowledge workers spend nearly 20% of their workweek just looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help. That’s almost a full day lost – every week. Knowledge only creates power when it’s shared. And sharing doesn’t happen in one way – it happens everywhere: 👉🏻 Through communication modes: writing, speaking, documenting, teaching 👉🏻 Through work channels: meetings, memos, wikis, workshops, 1:1s 👉🏻 Through human practices: storytelling, feedback, mentoring, peer learning Here’s how that plays out across the layers of an organisation, and what you can check and try today: Public ✍ Writing, speaking, publishing Ask: Do we encourage people to share externally? Try: Post one lesson learned this week on LinkedIn or your Substack. Corporate 📢 Memos, all-hands, newsletters Ask: Does strategy truly reach everyone? Try: Replace one slide deck with a short memo people can re-read. Divisional 📓 Playbooks, wikis, dashboards Ask: Do we capture lessons, or keep repeating mistakes? Try: Start a simple wiki or Notion for recurring questions. Team 🤝 Retros, async updates, lunch & learns Ask: Do we have rituals where peers teach peers? Try: Run a 15-min lunch & learn on a recent win, failure or new area of knowledge. 1:1 👥 Buddying, mentoring, coaching Ask: Are we pairing people to accelerate growth? Try: Match two colleagues who rarely work together and create a buddy system. Every layer reinforces the others. Public sharing sharpens internal clarity. Internal sharing creates stories worth sharing more widely. Knowledge doesn’t just add up. It compounds – but only if you put it into circulation. 🔔 Follow Si Conroy and ♻️ Share if you like this. 📩 Weekly sanity in my Progressive Group Therapy newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eTZq6A5D

𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘀?   𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗹 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗹𝘆.   Here are 6 proven, actionable strategies to break down those barriers and build a more connected, collaborative organization—starting today.   Corporate silos are when there are alternate departments that don't communicate.   It happens to all companies, despite their efforts.   As a manager, your ability to navigate these interdepartmental relationships can make your career. 🧭   Or doom it.   𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 6 𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆.   1 - 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 ✅Have your team connect with the team they work with. 💡In sales? Talk to the installers or fulfillment team.   2 - 𝗘𝗻𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. ✅Have your team send thank-you notes and copy the manager. You start this. 💡Have an install or order go well? Let them know you appreciate them.   3 - 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆. ✅You and your team engage with the other team for shadowing or ride along. 💡Pair up your team with a counterpart from the other department for 1/2 day and vise versa.   4 - 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. ✅Have the leader of another department cover a topic on each of your team calls. 💡Have a promotion from the sales team? Have the sales manager teach it out on your call.   5 - 𝗔𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝘆. ✅When explaining what you do, also explain why you do it. 💡Have a longer process for fulfillment because of compliance? Explain that to the sales team.   6 - Ask how you can help. ✅A great partnership can be built on understanding and how to assist one another. 💡Installers struggling reading sales orders? Commit to educating the sales team on better completion.   𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀: 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗴𝗼 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿. ✅Assume positive intent and seek to understand, not blame. 💡Don't allow your team to bash another team, seek feedback to understand.   By providing support and transparency across the enterprise, you will improve morale, productivity, and the culture.   Trust me, I built my career on doing this, and it never fails.   P.S. Do this well and you will expose yourself to a completely different leadership team and elevate your brand. Talk about job security!   𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗲 - 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘀? 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀? 𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝗺𝗲 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.   Like this post? Show me👇🏻 🔥 Engage 💬 Comment ♻️ Repost to your network. 📢Tell me in a DM   Hate it? - Tell me that too.   Want more?   Follow me here 👉🏼Matt Antonucci 🛎️