Great Teams Aren’t Enough

Need to Know

• High-performing teams can unintentionally become silos, creating barriers, misalignment, and friction across the organization.
• Managers play a critical role as The Link, connecting their team to the broader organization and ensuring information, priorities, and relationships flow effectively.
• The best leaders build bridges across teams, zoom out to align work with organizational goals, and help people successfully navigate change.

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The Paradox

After working with hundreds of teams across multiple industries, we’ve discovered a curious paradox:

Sometimes the best teams in an organization are also the worst.

Here’s what we’ve noticed:

1. Some teams perform their own work at a high level but create roadblocks for the work of others.
2. Some groups create a strong culture for themselves while contributing to a toxic culture in the organization.
3. Some managers are loved by their team but are pariahs among their peers.

Some groups create a strong culture for themselves while contributing to a toxic culture in the organization.

What Health Assessments Can’t Tell You

If you were to run a team health assessment on these groups, they would probably score full marks.  But zoom out just a little and you start to see the mess they’re leaving in their wake.

While highly engaged with their own group, these teams are disengaged from the broader organization, sometimes actively working against the overall strategic priorities in favor of their own. These teams become islands, cut-off and secluded from the organization. They operate with the mentality that the only thing they need to focus on is their work and their department – someone else can worry about the rest.

Why does this happen? Unfortunately, because it “works.” 

The ‘Us Against Them’ Mentality

One of the strongest ways to create unity in a group is to emphasize how you’re different than others. If a team believes that they’re exceptional, an “oasis of excellence” compared to the rest of the organization, they will naturally distance themselves from the culture and ways of working that are common in other departments.

Some teams go even further and create unity through a phenomenon known as common enemy intimacy, where they find their sense of shared identity from who they are against. If the organization is perceived as toxic or its senior leaders as dishonest or corrupt, the team will form strong bonds as they build protective and isolating walls around themselves.

This us-against-them mentality binds teams together while creating disastrous consequences for the organization. These thick-walled silos breed mistrust and division, foster misalignment and competing priorities, create confusion for customers, slow decision-making, and make innovation and change nearly impossible.

While the behavior may make sense from inside the team, the best managers we’ve worked avoid these pitfalls by embracing one key aspect of their job description: The Link Role.

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The Link Role

As a manager, your job doesn’t stop at developing your team, investing in your people, or planning and advancing your team’s work. You play a pivotal role in connecting your team with the organization.

You are a conduit and a filter that allow information and work to flow freely and effectively between your team and others. As management researcher Henry Mintzberg puts it:

“You are the neck of the hourglass.”

You stand in the middle and simultaneously protect your team’s ability to focus by sheltering them from outside noise while also ensuring they remain meaningfully integrated with other departments. 

You are a bridge and a symbol that represents the team to the rest of the organization, and vice versa. You are an advocate – someone who sits in the in-between space and negotiates on behalf of all parties.

As The Link, you understand that you are neither solely on the management team or the team that reports to you. Your role is to be fully engaged in both circles so that you can unite them as one broader team on a shared mission.

You are an advocate – someone who sits in the in-between space and negotiates on behalf of all parties.

Why It Matters

Being The Link isn’t easy, though. It often means balancing competing expectations, navigating internal politics, and disappointing somebody, no matter what you do. Being effective requires skills in communication, leadership, negotiation, networking, and strategic thinking, as well as a strong grasp of complex systems – all of which are hard to quantify and measure. As a result, there are many managers who attempt to go back to the simpler days of “being on the tools” and focusing only on their own work. 

However, if you can stay in the mess and embrace the challenge, you become the hidden glue that holds an organization together. The work you do behind the scenes keeps everything moving as you remove hurdles, manage conflict, spread information, and prevent crises.

Your unsung efforts ultimately create a workplace that is not only effective but also engaging and enjoyable.

Of the five areas that we believe managers need to focus on, this may be the one that holds the most potential to truly set you apart. There are plenty of managers who diligently focus on their work and the work of their teams, and far fewer who truly understand their role in leading the entire organization. 

We believe that embracing this Link role begins by focusing our energies in three directions.

01| Build Bridges

Breaking down silos is often approached with structural solutions, like redrawing the lines on the org chart. This can have a powerful effect, but ultimately the org chart doesn’t create silos, people do.

Our behaviors, relationships, and ways of interacting with others determine whether authentic collaboration happens. We may connect boxes with lines on a document, but if there is unhealthy competition or unresolved conflict that keeps people from genuinely talking to each other, we haven’t really moved the needle.

Moving to a more connected and collaborative work environment with other leaders in the organization starts with a simple realization: nobody else is going to do this for you. Whether you have a layer of management above you on the org chart or not, in practice, the work of building bridges depends on the skill and intentionality of the individual manager.

Practically, this means taking the time to connect with your fellow managers, understanding what they need from you, and building strong communication practices to keep you on the same page.

02| Zoom Out

Despite what we’ve said above, hunkering down in your silo once in a while isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You need to regularly carve out space for yourself and your team where you can complete your work, distraction-free.

However, as managers, we need to balance this by regularly lifting our heads above the work and paying attention to what else is going on around us. We live in the tension between zooming in and focusing on our team’s efforts and zooming out to see where the organization is headed.

Our role is to connect the dots and ensure that everyone on our team has a clear line of sight between their work and the broader work of the organization.

Practically, this involves making connections in these three areas:

1. Values and culture
2. Strategy and goals
3. Performance metrics

In each of these, we need to ensure that what we’re building and spending time on contributes to and strengthens what is being built in the broader organization.

03 | Drive Change

If there is one thing that consistently creates friction across boundaries in an organization, it’s change. Creating change in an organization is a complex process, and there are a lot of ways it can go awry:

• People don’t get consulted on matters that affect them.
• Leaders fail to communicate the rationale behind the change.
• Managers stay silent and passive-aggressively subvert change efforts.
• Employees become suspicious of motives and suspect they’re not getting all the real information.
• [Insert reason why the last change effort failed in your organization here.]

Despite all this, change needs to happen. Without it, work gets stale, and we can quickly become irrelevant.

If pressed, most employees would agree that they don’t want to be in a workplace that never changes. It’s the way changes are initiated and handled that’s the problem. As managers, we play a key role in ensuring that the right changes are approached in the right way.

Practically, this means we are helping our team adapt to changes coming from outside the team (rather than criticizing them) and, vice versa, we’re actively helping other teams adapt to the changes being initiated by our own team.  Regardless of who initiates the change, we’re the facilitators who ensure that everyone is able to succeed in the midst of it.

Creating change in an organization is a complex process, and there are a lot of ways it can go awry.

Be The Link

Being a manager in the middle isn’t easy. You’re constantly translating between your team and leadership, negotiating competing priorities, and trying to keep everyone moving in the same direction. It’s tempting to retreat to the simpler work of only managing your own team and letting someone else worry about the bigger picture.

While that may feel like the easier path, it’s also the road that leads to the silos, misalignment, and dysfunction we see so often in organizations. You have an opportunity to set yourself apart by resisting that temptation and embracing the influence you have as The Link to connect your team to your organization.

When you said yes to being a manager, you signed up not only to build a great team, but to also help build a great organization. 

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Key Takeaways

• Strong team performance does not always translate into organizational success.
• Team health assessments often fail to reveal a team’s impact on other departments.
• An “us vs. them” mentality can strengthen team culture while weakening organizational culture.
• Silos lead to mistrust, competing priorities, slower decision-making, and reduced innovation.
• Managers serve as a critical connection point between their team and the rest of the organization.
• Building relationships with peer leaders is one of the most effective ways to break down silos.
• Leaders should help employees connect their work to organizational values, strategy, and performance goals.
• Effective managers support change across organizational boundaries rather than focusing solely on their own team’s interests.
• Exceptional managers don’t just build great teams; they help build great organizations.

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Still Curious?

If you want to learn more about this topic, check out some of our related resources and products..

On-Demand Workshop

Management and Supervisions – The Crucial Skills

On-Demand Webinar

Change Management – A Leader’s Guide

Blog

The Formula for Workplace Performance: A Practical Manager’s Guide

Book

You Can Manage: A Practical Guide to Becoming the Manager Everyone Wants

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