How to Break Down Silos and Collaborate Across Government
Practical strategies to align goals, build trust, and work across boundaries
(10 min read)
In my past roles, I worked on silo-busting from the lens most familiar to many in digital government: tech. I’ve led efforts to modernize systems, centralize data, and integrate new automations and tools. Everything from performance analytics and data warehouses to robotic process automation and generative AI.
These are powerful levers. I’ve seen firsthand how streamlining procurement with better data allowed a state team to respond faster to emergencies. I’ve helped cities deploy AI to automate reporting, centralize and analyze resident feedback, and make service access easier and faster. But while these tools can unlock speed and efficiency, they don’t address the root of the problem.
Because what blocks collaboration in government isn’t just tech debt. It’s cultural debt.
Cross-agency collaboration is essential to tackling complex, systemic issues like climate resilience, economic development, homelessness, public health. But governments remain structured in vertical silos, where budgets aligned with org charts, and the work is optimized for departmental accountability, not shared outcomes.
We need better, faster ways to collaborate at every level. This moment demands it of us. It’s foundational to being able to keep our teams focused on outcomes that matter, respond faster in a crisis, and uncover innovative ways of addressing our biggest societal challenges.
There are no shortage of challenges these days, so let’s get better at working together.
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Why Silos Are So Hard To Bust
Government silos don’t exist because people are unwilling to collaborate. They exist because systems are designed around vertical accountability, not shared outcomes. Consider how budgets are structured and money flows through government. Agencies, departments, programs. There are special funds for temporary projects and initiatives, but generally those are short-term and more rigid.
This shows up in three interconnected ways:
Technical silos: Disconnected systems, processes, and workflows
Social silos: Fragmented teams, unclear working relationships, inconsistent communication
Strategic silos: Differing goals, misaligned incentives, and budget structures that discourage cross-agency investment
Most performance metrics, reporting lines, and budgets reinforce these patterns. That’s why even high-trust teams struggle to sustain collaboration unless they proactively design for it.
Start By Selling Your Cause
If you have a cause for collaboration, make sure to sell it broadly and get people on board. Identify opportunities for collaboration, pinpoint specific intervention points that require different teams to come together, and articulate the value of designing a more collaborative process. This can set you up for long term success in the following ways:
Helps others see and understand the perceived and actual barriers to collaboration, ensuring that the real barriers are named as problems to be solved and the perceived ones are called out with clear work arounds or action steps.
Identifies examples of where collaboration already works well between other teams. Have a couple of short anecdotes that result in wins can be used as stories to help shape a more collaborative culture.
If possible, quantify the potential upside of making changes to be more collaborative. How will a project timeline get shortened? How will a service get delivered faster? How might the quality improve? How much money could be saved or recovered?
In addition to calling out the upside of collaboration, explain the downside of the status quo. What are the inefficiencies, risk of errors, or morale issues that permeate the current approach? How might that be quantified in terms of time, headcount, and money?
Once you have buy in and have sold your cause, set your collaboration for success by ensuring everyone understands the challenge ahead, the team is connected and collaborative, and everyone agrees upon how they will work.
Check For Clarity → Care → Challenge
To help public sector leaders navigate these cultural barriers, I use a simple but powerful framework: Clarity, Care, and Challenge. It’s built from research, experience, and what I’ve seen actually shift how teams work. You can read more about the framework in my previous article on high-performing teams. Here’s how this framework relates to breaking down silos:
Clarity → How We Work:
Clear priorities, aligned expectations, and a shared understanding of how individual work connects to the bigger picture.Care → How We Relate:
Trust, psychological safety, and strong collaboration.
Challenge → How We Achieve:
Stretch goals, high standards, and a culture that encourages innovation and growth.
How We Work
Silos thrive in ambiguity. If no one can see the work, understand the language, or map who owns what, collaboration dies on arrival.
When I work with public sector teams, one of the first things I look for is how visible the work is. Can people across departments explain where things stand on a project today? Or what the context is behind a project? Do they know who’s accountable? Can they locate the latest draft of the work without digging through three email chains?
Often, the answer is no, and it’s not because people aren’t trying. It’s because our systems are optimized for siloed visibility, not shared clarity.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
A particular acronym means one thing to IT, another to leadership, and something entirely different to community stakeholders.
“Launch” for one team means public announcement. For another, it means testing a feature with a pilot group.
Documents live in private folders, on individual desktops, or in tools that don’t talk to each other.
You must actively keep designing for clarity, because left unchecked teams almost always regress to silos.
3 Ways To Work More Collaboratively
1. Work in the Open (I know, I say this a lot).
Create shared visibility into goals, timelines, and decision points. Tools like shared roadmaps, public dashboards, and open documentation practices make this easier. But it’s the habit of transparency that matters most.
Action step: Default to transparency. Share early drafts. Keep agendas, OKRs, and major decisions in places where others can see and comment.
2. Push for Shared Language
You can’t collaborate across silos if you’re not speaking the same operational language. Address institutional culture and bring people together with shared language and appropriate challenges that reinforce new shared language, processes and norms that aren’t specific to a vertical team or department.
Action step: Kick off every cross-agency project with a language alignment session. Define key terms: “What does done mean?” “What is this report for?” “Who is the user?” Clarifying early avoids confusion and costly rework later.
3. Be Brave and Ask Questions
Don’t let invisible complexity reinforce silos. When each team has its own update format, its own naming conventions, or its own way of doing reviews, collaboration slows down.
Don’t assume that just because a word is familiar, it’s being used the same way.
Ask:
“What exactly does that mean to you?”
“Where does this live?”
“Who will actually use this?”
“What does success look like here?”
It might feel risky to ask these questions, but in practice, asking for clarity builds trust. It surfaces misalignment early and sends the message that precision matters. You’re not just being pedantic—you’re doing service to the entire team.
Action step: Standardize file naming, decision logs, and status updates especially for work that spans teams. Bonus: this improves onboarding and succession planning too.
How We Relate
You can’t collaborate with people you don’t know or trust. And trust isn’t built during a crisis, it’s built long before one begins.
The most effective silo-busters I’ve met were masterful relationship builders. They worked across lines of authority, showed up to others’ meetings, listened more than they spoke, and kept showing up even when progress was slow.
In their 2023 study on city-led public safety reform, Harvard researchers found that successful cross-agency collaboration depended just as much on “interpersonal trust and informal norms” as on formal coordination mechanisms.
ACTION STEPS:
Map your relationship network. Who do you depend on to do your best work and how often are you in conversation with them? Sending a friendly note, check in with people outside of your team without an agenda. These things go a long way.
Hold informal meetings to build connection. Before big cross-agency gatherings, get coffee, have an informal call, share something about yourself unrelated to the project and get genuinely curious about the other person’s perspective, goals, and needs. You will build better alignment and a foundation for having a trusted person to talk to when inevitable challenges arise.
Practice active listening and presence. Repeat back what you hear, surface concerns, and name tensions without personalizing them.
If you’re in a leadership role, model the behavior. Ask how collaboration feels, not just how it performs.
How We Achieve
Even the best relationships break down if incentives point in opposite directions. If my promotion depends on what my team does alone, why would I spend time on a cross-agency initiative with shared credit and unclear ownership?
You need shared goals and clear structures to pursue them together. My favorite example of this is a success story from the Federal Government:
Between 2010 and 2016, a joint performance goal between HUD and the Department of Veterans Affairs reduced veteran homelessness by 47%. They aligned funding, shared data, and made accountability public.
“This progress should give us confidence that when we find new ways to work together—and when we set bold goals and hold ourselves accountable—nothing is unsolvable.” —Matthew Doherty, USICH
Their success wasn’t the result of aiming for a 47 percent reduction. The goal was to end veteran homelessness entirely. They didn’t achieve that, but they made extraordinary progress because they focused on what it would take to reach an ambition that was meaningful, visible, and urgent. And they did it together.
ACTION STEPS:
Start small. Choose one mission-based project and define success jointly across agencies. Create temporary mission-based teams that are designed with explicit feedback loops between the people making the policies about services and the people delivering them. Push the decision making closer to people on the front lines.
Make shared goals visible. Publish outcomes in a shared place where progress can be tracked openly across teams.
Link collaboration to performance reviews. Recognize and reward people for succeeding together, not just individually.
If you’re managing a team, consider this: are your goals reinforcing silos? Or breaking them?
Let’s Talk About Culture Is Infrastructure
Too often, we treat culture as the soft stuff. But in government, culture is infrastructure. It determines how decisions get made, how people show up, and how trust travels through the system.
If you want to modernize how government works, don’t just update your tech stack. Update your assumptions, your incentives, your habits, and your relationships.
Because the hardest system to modernize isn’t your database. It’s your culture.
And when you start there, everything else including the tools actually starts to work.
If you want to continue the conversation…
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