Break down silos and beat the competition with effective communication
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Break down silos and beat the competition with effective communication
Danny Coleman
Published on 16 September 2025
6 min read
Danny Coleman
Published on 16 September 2025
6 min read
Find out what poor communication costs you, why it's a leadership imperative, and what great communication looks like.
The cost of poor communication
If poor communication is causing your problems, you're not alone. It's a common and costly issue for organisations in all sectors. What do we mean by poor communication? It's when information isn't shared clearly and consistently or in the right place. It causes siloed working, where only certain people or teams have certain knowledge.
When communication isn't great, teams will work in isolation, missing collaboration opportunities and duplicating effort. This slows down decision-making as people struggle to find fragmented information. If poor communication is left to fester, it can lead to disengaged employees over time. People will feel frustrated by mixed messages, undervalued, and unsure of the company's vision.
You can imagine what happens next: productivity drops, innovation fails, and company morale hits rock bottom. Poor communication isn't just inefficient. It impacts trust and erodes efforts to align everyone around common goals.
When communication isn't great, teams will work in isolation, missing collaboration opportunities and duplicating effort. This slows down decision-making as people struggle to find fragmented information. If poor communication is left to fester, it can lead to disengaged employees over time. People will feel frustrated by mixed messages, undervalued, and unsure of the company's vision.
You can imagine what happens next: productivity drops, innovation fails, and company morale hits rock bottom. Poor communication isn't just inefficient. It impacts trust and erodes efforts to align everyone around common goals.
Why great leaders need great communication
Traditionally, communication has been seen as a secondary skill. But it's actually a leadership imperative. Great leaders know that to inspire, align, and motivate people, they must communicate clearly and consistently in a way that resonates with the broader organisation.
Here are some of the things great communication does:
Here are some of the things great communication does:
- Ensures everyone knows what to do and why it matters to the business.
- Helps leaders cascade priorities, reinforce goals, and foster feedback loops so that you can spot risks and issues early on.
- Instils psychological safety so your employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns.
- Fosters innovation and problem-solving. The more people know and talk to each other, the faster they can find innovative solutions.
- Eradicates uncertainty and helps build trust, so teams can focus on what counts.
Breaking silos to drive growth
The most significant benefit of excellent communication is smashing silos. Silos don't just slow you down—they limit what you can achieve. Disconnected teams can't cross-pollinate their ideas, they can't maximise customer insights, and they'll miss out on innovations.
By breaking down silos, you'll foster collaboration, which is so important for growth. Your different departments can share their knowledge and resources, align and prioritise goals, and move more efficiently towards achieving their objectives. Siloed no more, you can spot growth opportunities sooner and respond more quickly.
By breaking down silos, you'll foster collaboration, which is so important for growth. Your different departments can share their knowledge and resources, align and prioritise goals, and move more efficiently towards achieving their objectives. Siloed no more, you can spot growth opportunities sooner and respond more quickly.
What does great communication look like?
Excellent communication comprises:
- Clarity and consistency, for everyone – you should always be clear, consistent, and inclusive. Great communication connects people across departments and ensures that everyone understands their tasks and the bigger picture.
- Freeflowing information – it's about breaking down the invisible walls between teams, so information flows freely and work aligns with shared goals.
- Listen as much as you speak. Remember to create space for feedback, questions, and diverse perspectives to help you learn and adapt accordingly.
So what exactly does great communication look like?
Let's take a classic example of product, marketing, and sales teams. Their work crosses paths regularly, with plenty of dependencies in different directions. When they communicate well, you'll get a seamless customer journey, whereby you can move from concept to launch to customer aftercare without any missed opportunities.
Similarly, when HR and leadership communicate openly, employees feel engaged and supported, strengthening culture and boosting retention. The impact ripples across the organisation – fewer bottlenecks, faster decisions, and more innovative outcomes.
Communication tools you can't afford to miss
Shouting into the wind isn't going to cut it. To communicate at your best, you'll need the right tools. We're talking platforms that centralise all your information, integrate workflows, and create transparency across different teams.
monday.com is one great example. It acts as a single source of truth, helping to break down silos and provide one easily accessible place to update, prioritise, and see progress.
What's more, it can be paired with Slack, Teams, or Zoom for real-time dialogue and knowledge-sharing platforms like Confluence for documentation, or integrated with Jira to connect business and technical teams more easily. A platform like monday.com doesn't just enable communication; it supports collaborative working and helps everyone align around business goals.
monday.com is one great example. It acts as a single source of truth, helping to break down silos and provide one easily accessible place to update, prioritise, and see progress.
What's more, it can be paired with Slack, Teams, or Zoom for real-time dialogue and knowledge-sharing platforms like Confluence for documentation, or integrated with Jira to connect business and technical teams more easily. A platform like monday.com doesn't just enable communication; it supports collaborative working and helps everyone align around business goals.
Shared knowledge for shared success
Ultimately, communication is about sharing information. It transforms your organisation's knowledge into an engine for growth – an often overlooked competitive advantage. Openly communicating your insights, best practices, and lessons learned across the business reduces duplication, accelerates learning, and ensures everyone makes more intelligent decisions.
Here's how else great communication helps you beat out the competition:
Here's how else great communication helps you beat out the competition:
- It's vital for effective change management, including embracing new tools like AI. It helps employees adapt faster to the 'what' and the 'why'. Empowered with the knowledge they need to make change, people will also be less resistant to it.
- It supports scalability—standardised knowledge can be replicated and disseminated to everyone, so new projects and teams don't have to reinvent the wheel.
- It fosters accountability and transparency, and reduces risk, all of which are essential for strengthening governance.
In a highly competitive landscape, the ability to leverage shared knowledge through effective communication separates the businesses that merely keep up from those that lead the way.
Get in touch with our work management experts and we'll help.
We work with global companies to discover where communication is breaking down and recommend and implement the best solutions to get you where you need to be. Get in touch to learn more and talk through some of your challenges.
Written by
Director, Strategic Services and Operations
Danny leads Adaptavist's monday.com Professional Services globally, directing teams that deliver complex system migrations and enterprise work management transformations. He focuses on strategic leadership and clarity, helping global organisations navigate complexity and scale confidently.