15 Warning Signs of Silos in Your School Leadership Team

Silos in a school leadership team do not announce themselves. There is no moment where your principal, deputies, and heads of department sit down and decide to stop collaborating. Silos develop gradually, almost invisibly, until one day you realise that your leadership team is not actually leading together. They are leading separately, in parallel, occasionally bumping into each other at meetings but never genuinely integrating their work.

Patrick Lencioni, author of Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, describes this phenomenon as the natural consequence of organisations that lack a unifying rallying cry. Without a shared priority that transcends departmental interests, leaders default to optimising their own area at the expense of the whole. In schools, this creates a leadership team where the head of curriculum, the head of wellbeing, and the business manager each run their domain brilliantly but never connect their work in ways that serve students holistically.

Research consistently shows that schools with cohesive leadership teams outperform those with fragmented ones. A study from the University of Minnesota found that collaborative school leadership was the single strongest predictor of positive school climate, ahead of individual leader quality or available resources. When your leadership team operates in silos, you are not just losing efficiency. You are actively undermining the culture that drives student outcomes.

This article identifies 15 warning signs that your school leadership team is operating in silos, drawn from my experience facilitating leadership team workshops for schools across Australia, the UK, USA, Singapore, Canada, India, and beyond. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), I work with school leadership teams that are technically competent but functionally fragmented. If you recognise five or more of these signs, your team needs intervention. The good news is that silos can be broken down with the right approach, the right tools, and the right support.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how Jonno White can facilitate a Working Genius session or leadership team offsite to break down silos at your school.

1. Leadership Meetings Are Update Rounds, Not Decision Sessions

The clearest sign of a siloed leadership team is a meeting where each person reports on their area and then everyone moves on. There is no genuine discussion, no interdependent decision making, and no moment where the whole team wrestles with a problem together. Each leader shares their update, and the principal nods and moves to the next agenda item.

If your leadership meetings could be replaced by a shared document where each leader posts their update, you do not have a leadership team. You have a reporting structure that happens to sit in the same room once a week. Effective leadership meetings should include at least one agenda item that requires the whole team to debate, decide, and commit together. If that element is missing, your meeting structure is reinforcing silos rather than breaking them down. For a comprehensive guide to transforming how your school runs meetings, check out my blog post '27 Proven Strategies for Effective Staff Meetings in Schools' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/effective-staff-meetings-schools.

2. Leaders Use 'My' Instead of 'Our'

Listen carefully to the language your leadership team uses. If you consistently hear my department, my teachers, my students, my budget, rather than our school, our staff, our priorities, silos have taken root. Language reveals mindset. When leaders frame their work as belonging to their portfolio rather than contributing to a shared mission, they have psychologically separated from the team.

This tribal language, as Harvard Business Review describes it, signals that leaders view themselves as department heads first and team members second. The shift from my to our is not just semantics. It reflects a fundamental change in how leaders understand their role. Pay attention to language in your next leadership meeting. If you count more instances of my than our, the silo mentality is embedded in your team's culture.

3. Cross Portfolio Projects Consistently Stall

Projects that sit within a single leader's portfolio progress smoothly. Projects that require two or more leaders to collaborate stall, get delayed, or produce watered down outcomes because nobody takes ownership of the space between portfolios. In a school context, this might look like a student wellbeing initiative that requires both the wellbeing team and the curriculum team to redesign how pastoral care interacts with academic support.

If neither leader feels responsible for the integration, the project dies in the gap between them. The gap between portfolios is where the most important work in a school lives, and it is exactly where silos cause the most damage. When I facilitate Working Genius sessions with school leadership teams, this pattern becomes visible immediately. The team map reveals whether anyone on the team has the Genius of Galvanizing, the type of work that rallies people across boundaries. Without it, cross portfolio work simply does not happen.

To book Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, to map your leadership team's genius profile and identify where cross portfolio collaboration is breaking down, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

4. Staff Get Different Answers from Different Leaders

When a teacher asks the deputy principal about a policy and gets one answer, then asks the head of department about the same policy and gets a different answer, the leadership team is not aligned. This is not just confusing for staff, it is corrosive. Teachers quickly learn which leader is most likely to give the answer they want, and they start shopping for the response that suits them.

This dynamic, sometimes called leader shopping, is a direct consequence of leadership silos. If your leaders have not discussed and agreed on key policies, practices, and priorities, staff will receive contradictory guidance. The resulting confusion damages trust in the entire leadership team, not just the individual leader who gave the wrong answer. The fix is straightforward but requires discipline: your leadership team needs to identify the 20 most common decisions staff ask about and agree on shared responses. This exercise alone reveals how much misalignment exists beneath the surface of what appears to be a functioning team.

5. Information Does Not Flow Between Portfolios

In a siloed leadership team, information stays within each leader's sphere. The head of wellbeing knows about a struggling student, but the head of curriculum does not, so academic adjustments are not made. The business manager knows about a budget constraint, but the head of teaching and learning does not, so they propose an initiative the school cannot afford.

When information flows only vertically (within each portfolio) rather than horizontally (across the leadership team), decisions are made with incomplete data. This is not a communication skills problem. It is a structural problem that reflects the absence of systems for sharing information across portfolio boundaries. DISC profiling can help here by revealing how different leaders prefer to share and receive information. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss a DISC workshop for your leadership team.

6. Your Strategic Plan Has Separate Sections That Never Intersect

Open your school's strategic plan. If it reads like a collection of independent departmental plans stapled together rather than an integrated strategy, your leadership team built it in silos. A genuinely collaborative strategic plan has themes and priorities that cut across multiple portfolios and require leaders to work together on shared outcomes.

If each section of your strategic plan could be removed without affecting the others, your leaders planned independently and assembled their plans afterwards. The strategic planning process itself is often where silos become visible, or where they can be broken if you redesign the process to require genuine interdependence. Jonno White facilitates strategic planning days for school leadership teams that are specifically designed to create cross portfolio integration. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore this option for your next planning cycle.

7. Leaders Protect Their Territory When Resources Are Discussed

Budget and resource allocation conversations reveal silos instantly. In a healthy leadership team, budget discussions start with the school's priorities and then allocate resources to serve those priorities. In a siloed team, budget discussions become negotiations where each leader fights for their share, treats any reduction as a personal loss, and views another leader's gain as a threat.

If your budget conversations feel like a zero sum game where leaders are competing rather than collaborating, silos have created a territorial mentality that will resist every attempt at integration. This is one of the hardest dynamics to shift because it connects to each leader's sense of professional identity and value. Breaking this pattern requires reframing the conversation from how much does my area get to what does our school need most. Breaking this pattern requires reframing the conversation from how much does my area get to what does our school need most. Some schools have found success by removing individual portfolio budget allocations entirely for one cycle and instead allocating resources based on school wide priorities voted on collectively by the leadership team.

8. New Initiatives Are Announced Rather Than Co Designed

When a senior leader launches a new initiative without consulting colleagues whose portfolios are affected, they are operating in a silo. It might be the head of curriculum introducing a new assessment framework without discussing it with the wellbeing team, whose workload will increase. Or the business manager implementing a new booking system without consulting the teachers who will use it daily.

Announcing rather than co designing signals that the leader either does not see the interdependence or does not value their colleagues' input. Either way, the initiative is less likely to succeed and more likely to generate resentment. The solution is to establish a norm that any initiative affecting more than one portfolio must be co designed, with affected leaders involved from the concept stage rather than informed at the implementation stage. A useful rule of thumb: if an initiative will affect the workload, processes, or outcomes of anyone outside your portfolio, it should be co designed from the beginning. This simple principle, when enforced consistently, prevents the launch and react cycle that characterises siloed leadership teams.

9. The Principal Is the Only Connection Point Between Leaders

In a siloed leadership team, all communication routes through the principal. Leaders do not talk to each other directly about cross portfolio matters. They raise it with the principal and expect the principal to relay the message. This makes the principal a bottleneck for every decision and creates an unhealthy dependency.

It also means the principal is constantly translating between leaders who should be communicating directly. If your principal is spending more time coordinating between their leadership team than leading the school, the leadership team has functionally dissolved into a collection of direct reports who happen to have senior titles. The fix is bilateral meetings between leaders with interdependent portfolios, scheduled fortnightly, with a clear agenda focused on shared work. When leaders communicate directly with each other rather than routing everything through the principal, decisions happen faster, context is preserved more accurately, and the principal is freed to focus on the strategic and relational work that only a principal can do.

10. Professional Development Is Planned in Isolation

When each leader plans PD for their area without coordinating with the rest of the leadership team, staff experience a fragmented professional learning program. The curriculum team runs one PD focus, the wellbeing team runs another, and the digital learning coordinator runs a third. None of these connect, and teachers feel pulled in multiple directions without a coherent development narrative.

A cohesive leadership team designs PD together, ensuring that themes build on each other, sessions complement rather than compete, and the overall program serves the school's strategic priorities. If your PD calendar looks like a collection of unrelated events, your leadership team planned it in silos. For more on designing PD days that build genuine collaboration, check out my blog post '21 Practical Tips for a School PD Day Staff Love' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/school-pd-day-tips.

11. Leaders Do Not Know What Their Colleagues Are Working On

Ask your head of wellbeing what the head of curriculum's top three priorities are this term. If they cannot answer, or if their answer is wrong, your leadership team is not sharing information at a meaningful level. In a healthy leadership team, each leader has enough awareness of their colleagues' work to identify opportunities for collaboration, anticipate conflicts, and provide support.

In a siloed team, leaders are so focused on their own area that they have no visibility of what is happening beside them. This ignorance is not malicious. It is the natural consequence of a team that meets to report rather than to integrate. A simple intervention is to start each leadership meeting with a 60 second round where each leader shares their single biggest priority for the week and names one area where they need input from a colleague. This practice takes less than ten minutes per meeting but fundamentally shifts the team from parallel operation to connected awareness. Over time, leaders begin to proactively identify opportunities for collaboration because they actually know what their colleagues are working on.

12. Conflict Is Avoided Rather Than Addressed

Silos and conflict avoidance are deeply connected. Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model places fear of conflict as the second dysfunction, sitting directly above absence of trust. When leaders operate in silos, they avoid the productive conflict that comes from genuinely debating decisions that affect multiple portfolios.

Instead of arguing about the right approach to student support (which would require the wellbeing and curriculum leaders to engage with each other's perspectives), they simply retreat to their own area and make decisions independently. This avoidance feels like peace, but it is actually the absence of engagement. The most important decisions in a school require leaders to disagree, debate, and ultimately commit to a shared approach. My book Step Up or Step Out provides practical frameworks for having these conversations constructively. You can find it at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD.

13. Success Is Celebrated Departmentally, Not Collectively

Pay attention to how wins are celebrated in your school. If the curriculum team celebrates their NAPLAN results without acknowledging the wellbeing team's contribution to student readiness, silos are shaping how your leaders see success. If the business manager celebrates a budget surplus without recognising the teaching staff whose program design made it possible, the school is not operating as one team.

In a healthy leadership team, success belongs to the whole school. Leaders instinctively acknowledge the interdependence that produced the result. In a siloed team, success belongs to the department, and leaders compete for credit rather than sharing it. Shifting this dynamic requires the principal to model collective celebration consistently and to call it out when leaders claim wins that belong to the whole team.

14. Exit Interviews Reveal Leadership Dysfunction

If your school conducts exit interviews with departing staff, and multiple people mention leadership confusion, contradictory directions, or a sense that the leadership team is not on the same page, you have a silo problem that is costing you talent. Departing staff often feel free to say things that current staff will not, and their feedback is some of the most honest data your school will ever receive.

If you are not conducting exit interviews, start. The patterns they reveal about leadership cohesion are invaluable. If you are conducting them and hearing consistent feedback about leadership disconnection, take it seriously. Good teachers leave schools where the leadership does not function as a team. For more on how leadership conflict drives talent loss, check out my blog post '11 Steps When Two School Leaders Can't Work Together' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/school-leaders-conflict. The cost of replacing a single experienced teacher, including recruitment, onboarding, and the disruption to student learning, can exceed $30,000. When leadership silos drive the departure of multiple staff members each year, the financial and educational impact is substantial.

15. You Recognise Your School in This List

The final sign is the simplest. If you have read this far and found yourself nodding, your school leadership team has a silo problem. Most school leaders instinctively know when their team is not functioning well. They feel it in meetings that go nowhere, in hallway conversations where colleagues speak about rather than to each other, and in the persistent sense that the school could be so much better if only the leadership team could get on the same page.

That instinct is worth trusting. The question is not whether the silos exist. The question is what you are going to do about them. If you recognised five or more of these signs, your school leadership team needs support to break down silos and rebuild as a genuinely cohesive unit.

To book Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, to diagnose where collaboration is breaking down and build practical systems for working together more effectively, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Silos Form in School Leadership Teams

Silos rarely form because of bad intent. They form because of structural and cultural factors that make independent operation easier than collaboration. The most common cause is portfolio based structure without integration mechanisms. When a school assigns each leader a clear portfolio (curriculum, wellbeing, operations, co-curricular) and then does not create systems for those portfolios to intersect, silos are inevitable. The structure itself produces isolation.

The second cause is the busyness of school life. Schools operate at an extraordinary pace, and leaders are often so consumed by their own operational demands that cross portfolio collaboration feels like an optional luxury rather than a core responsibility. The urgent displaces the important, and the important work of integration never happens.

The third cause is personality and Working Genius mismatch. If your leadership team is heavy on Tenacity (pushing through to completion in their own area) and light on Galvanizing (rallying people across areas), no one is naturally creating the momentum for cross portfolio work. Working Genius reveals these team dynamics quickly and gives the team language for discussing what is missing. The fourth cause is trust deficit. When leaders do not trust each other's competence or intentions, they retreat to their own territory where they feel safe and in control. Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions model shows that absence of trust is the foundation of all team dysfunction, and silos are one of the most visible symptoms. Addressing trust directly, often through facilitated conversations and shared assessment experiences, is the prerequisite for every other intervention.

Seven Practical Steps to Break Down School Leadership Silos

First, redesign your leadership meetings. Replace the update round with decision focused agendas where the team debates genuine cross portfolio issues. Limit updates to a shared document that leaders read before the meeting. Second, create shared goals that require collaboration. In your strategic plan, include at least three priorities that span multiple portfolios and require leaders to co own the outcome. Evaluate leaders partly on their contribution to shared goals, not only on their portfolio performance.

Third, use a team assessment to create shared language. Working Genius shows your leadership team where their collective workflow breaks down. DISC shows how communication styles create friction. Either tool, facilitated well, gives the team a vocabulary for discussing dynamics that are otherwise invisible. Fourth, build in regular cross portfolio check ins. Beyond the main leadership meeting, create brief bilateral meetings where leaders with interdependent portfolios sync on shared work.

Fifth, invest in an annual leadership team offsite. Once a year, take your leadership team offsite for a full day focused entirely on how the team functions together. This is not a strategic planning day. It is a team health day where you explore trust, communication, conflict, and accountability. An external facilitator makes this investment significantly more productive. Sixth, model the behaviour you expect. When you consult colleagues before making decisions, share information proactively, and celebrate collective wins, you set the standard. Seventh, address trust directly through facilitated conversations that surface the unspoken issues and establish new norms. Seventh, address trust directly through facilitated conversations that surface the unspoken issues, rebuild relational trust, and establish new norms for how leaders will work together. This is difficult, uncomfortable work that most leadership teams cannot do without external support, but it is the foundation on which every other intervention depends.

Jonno White facilitates Working Genius sessions, DISC workshops, and leadership team offsites for schools across Australia and internationally. Whether virtual or face to face, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what your school needs.

How Working Genius Reveals Hidden Silos

Working Genius is uniquely suited to diagnosing silo dynamics because it reveals how each leader naturally contributes to the work cycle. When you map your leadership team's collective Working Genius profile, patterns emerge that explain why certain areas of school life thrive while others stagnate.

A leadership team heavy on Wonder and Invention will generate brilliant ideas but struggle to move them through Discernment and into Implementation. This stagnation looks like silos because each leader takes their ideas back to their own portfolio and tries to implement independently rather than relying on the team for the activation stages. A team heavy on Enablement and Tenacity will execute brilliantly within defined boundaries but never challenge the status quo.

The team map also reveals where individual leaders are working in their frustration zones, doing work that drains them because no one else on the team has that genius. A deputy principal forced to Galvanize when their genius is Discernment will retreat to solo evaluation work and avoid the rallying role. This looks like a silo, but it is actually a genius gap masquerading as a structural problem.

To map your school leadership team's Working Genius profile and understand how it connects to the silo dynamics you are experiencing, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Jonno White, trusted facilitator across Australia, the UK, USA, Singapore, Canada, and beyond, facilitates Working Genius team sessions that move from assessment to action in a single half day workshop.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my school leadership team has silos?

If leaders use 'my' instead of 'our' when referring to school work, if cross portfolio projects consistently stall, if staff receive different answers from different leaders, or if your strategic plan reads like separate departmental plans stapled together, silos are present. If you recognised five or more of the 15 warning signs in this article, your team needs intervention.

What causes silos in school leadership teams?

The four most common causes are portfolio based structures without integration mechanisms, the busyness of school life that makes collaboration feel optional, personality and Working Genius mismatches that leave no one naturally rallying cross portfolio work, and trust deficits that cause leaders to retreat to their own territory. Understanding the root cause determines the right intervention.

Can Working Genius help break down silos?

Working Genius is one of the most effective tools for diagnosing and addressing silo dynamics. It reveals where your team's collective workflow breaks down and gives leaders shared language for discussing why collaboration stalls at certain points. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, has facilitated sessions where silo patterns became visible within the first 30 minutes of a team debrief. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss a session for your school.

How long does it take to break down leadership silos?

With deliberate intervention, most school leadership teams see meaningful improvement within one to two terms. Quick wins like redesigning meeting agendas and establishing cross portfolio check ins can shift dynamics within weeks. Deeper cultural change, including building trust and establishing shared accountability, typically takes 6 to 12 months of consistent effort.

Should I bring in an external facilitator to address silos?

For entrenched silos, external facilitation is significantly more effective than internal efforts. An external facilitator brings neutrality, diagnostic tools, and expertise in team dynamics that most school leaders do not have. The investment typically ranges from $2,000 to $7,500 and delivers returns that far exceed the cost of continued dysfunction, talent loss, and operational inefficiency.

What is the difference between silos and healthy specialisation?

Healthy specialisation means leaders have clear portfolios but integrate their work through shared goals, regular cross portfolio communication, and collaborative decision making. Silos exist when leaders optimise their own area at the expense of the whole, when information does not flow between portfolios, and when the principal is the only connection point between leaders. The test is simple: can your leaders explain each other's top three priorities this term?

Your Leadership Team Deserves Better

School leadership is one of the most demanding roles in any sector. The principals, deputies, and senior leaders who run our schools carry enormous responsibility for the academic, social, emotional, and physical development of hundreds or thousands of young people. They deserve to work in a leadership team that functions as a genuine team, not a collection of talented individuals operating in parallel.

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD). He has facilitated leadership team workshops for schools across Australia, the UK, USA, Singapore, Canada, India, and beyond. His Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference achieved a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating. He delivers Working Genius team sessions, DISC workshops (Behaviors That Bond), CliftonStrengths sessions (StrengthsFinder Amplified), and full day leadership team offsites designed to break down silos and build the cohesive team your school needs.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to arrange a confidential conversation about your school's leadership team dynamics. Whether you need a diagnostic session, a full team offsite, or a multi session program across the year, Jonno tailors every engagement to your school's unique context and goals. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect, and many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs less than engaging high profile local providers.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD), and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. He hosts The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries and founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for a leadership team offsite, Working Genius session, or school PD day, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

17 Key Differences: Working Genius vs DISC for Schools

If you are considering team assessments for your school's leadership team, this guide compares the two most popular options: Working Genius and DISC. Both are excellent tools, but they measure fundamentally different things and solve different problems. Choosing the right one for your school's specific situation makes the difference between a PD investment that transforms your team and one that generates interesting conversation but no lasting change.

This honest comparison covers 17 key differences, from what each tool measures to which school challenges each one addresses best, plus a decision guide to help you choose.

Keep Reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/working-genius-vs-disc-schools