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Management & Leadership vocabulary · Organisational Structure

Silo

Meaning in management & leadership, with examples

/ˈsaɪloʊ/nounCommon term

In management & leadership, silo means: A department or team that works in isolation and does not share information or cooperate well with other parts of the same organisation.

In Turkish: silo, kendi içine kapalı birim

How it is used

Almost always negative. People talk about working in silos, a silo mentality and breaking down silos. The word comes from the tall towers used to store grain on farms.

Example sentences

  1. Marketing and sales work in silos, so customers get mixed messages.

  2. The new CEO's first priority is to break down the silos between regions.

Common collocations

  • work in silos
  • break down silos
  • silo mentality
  • departmental silos
  • matrix structureAn organisational structure in which employees report to two managers at the same time, usually a functional manager and a project or product manager.
  • org chartA diagram that shows how an organisation is structured, with boxes for roles or people and lines showing who reports to whom.
  • alignmentA state in which teams, goals and actions support the same strategy and priorities, so that different parts of an organisation work in the same direction.
  • hierarchyA system in which the people in an organisation are arranged in levels, with each level having more authority than the one below it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Organisational Structure

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