Bridging Pyramids Within Pyramids: Linking Silos at Every Level

Q: What are the most common failures that emerge from organizational silos?

The biggest risks center on a lack of communication and linear thinking . It is important to recognize that hierarchical reporting chains often make sense organizationally. The danger emerges when these logical structures become too rigid and the “pyramid walls become too thick,” unintentionally inhibiting necessary communication between operational units. When departments operate without a clear understanding of each other’s work and objectives, critical information gets trapped. A classic example involves a sales team that receives valuable customer feedback about a desired product improvement. Because their current sales are strong, they fail to share this insight with the Research & Development (R&D) or marketing departments. A competitor, however, picks up on the same market signal, launches an improved product, and seizes significant market share. This failure is not one of malice, but of a systemic breakdown in cross-functional communication.

Bridging Pyramids within Pyramids

Lessons from a Mid-Level Bureaucrat

**Great governance doesn’t happen at the top, It happens between the layers.**

Most organizations aren’t built as a single hierarchy. They are pyramids within pyramids — nested organizational structures where silos form not just between departments, but at every level.

In corporate governance, organizational leadership, and enterprise risk management, these hidden silos often undermine strategy execution.

Too often, leaders try to fix fragmentation by connecting only at the executive level. The result? Strategy that doesn’t travel, trust that doesn’t stick, and governance frameworks that struggle to scale.

This exclusive leadership and governance webinar explores a more powerful truth:

**The strongest organizations are built by bridging across levels, not just across titles.**

Key Governance & Leadership Takeaways

During this leadership webinar, Christopher will share real-world examples and actionable governance strategies to help you:

Identify hidden organizational structures
Understand how nested hierarchies create silos within silos and why they persist.
Bridge leadership beyond the executive level
Learn practical techniques for connecting people, decisions, and governance processes across multiple organizational levels.
Activate mid-level leaders and managers
Empower the critical connectors who translate corporate strategy into operational results.
Strengthen governance through cross-level collaboration
Discover how connected leadership improves resilience, accountability, and long-term organizational performance.

Featured Speaker: Christopher Stitt

Christopher Stitt is a global security and leadership expert, author, and founder of Crisis Lead, LLC. With more than 25 years of experience — including senior roles in the U.S. Department of State — Christopher helps organizations strengthen governance, leadership alignment, and crisis readiness in complex environments.

He is the author of Scaling Pyramids: Leadership Lessons from a Mid-Level Bureaucrat, a leadership and governance book that blends personal experience with contemporary research to deliver practical strategies for today’s organizations.

Pre-order the book here

with host:

Key Questions Answered

How can boards gain visibility into governance below the C-suite without undermining management?

The foundational principle is that any effort to gain deeper visibility must be conducted in concert with the CEO and through formal board mechanisms, such as an audit or risk or security committee. This approach respects the chain of command and avoids undermining management’s authority.

With this framework in place, boards can proactively “dig deeper” using several methods:

Review Detailed Documentation: Boards have the right to request and review the detailed policies and procedures that govern day-to-day operations. This provides insight into the documented framework intended to guide the organization.
Engage in Site Visits: Partnering with the CEO to conduct site visits allows directors to get a tangible feel for how operations actually work and flow. These visits offer a real-world perspective that cannot be conveyed in a report.
Conduct Briefings and Interviews: During site visits or other engagements, boards can receive briefings directly from mid-level managers. They can also conduct limited interviews to hear perspectives from those responsible for executing strategy.

These actions are supported by legitimate business needs, including assessing risk exposure, evaluating crisis preparedness, gauging leadership readiness at lower levels, and understanding the true, lived organizational culture beyond what is stated on posters in the hallways.

How should a board clarify decision rights and accountability throughout the organization?

First and foremost, a board must not interfere with management authority. Its primary role is to ensure the CEO is an effective manager who has established clear and efficient management processes. This includes the responsibility to instill a solid risk management culture throughout the organization. In such a culture, the thresholds for both decision-making and the requirement for escalating issues must be unambiguous, ensuring that every employee understands their scope of authority and when to raise a concern to a higher level.

What are the most common failures that emerge from organizational silos?

The biggest risks center on a lack of communication and linear thinking. It is important to recognize that hierarchical reporting chains often make sense organizationally. The danger emerges when these logical structures become too rigid and the “pyramid walls become too thick,” unintentionally inhibiting necessary communication between operational units. When departments operate without a clear understanding of each other’s work and objectives, critical information gets trapped.

A classic example involves a sales team that receives valuable customer feedback about a desired product improvement. Because their current sales are strong, they fail to share this insight with the Research & Development (R&D) or marketing departments. A competitor, however, picks up on the same market signal, launches an improved product, and seizes significant market share. This failure is not one of malice, but of a systemic breakdown in cross-functional communication.

What practical steps can be taken to encourage cross-collaboration and break down these silos?

Several strategies can be implemented to foster communication and collaboration between teams at all levels:

Cross-Functional Teams: Creating project or product teams that include members from different departments (e.g., sales, marketing, R&D, finance) forces collaboration and ensures diverse perspectives are integrated from the start.
Cross-Domain Excursions: This practice involves allowing employees from one domain to embed in another for a day or a week. For instance, having intelligence analysts go into the field with operators helps them understand real-world information needs, while having operators sit in the intelligence hub helps them understand data collection capabilities. This exchange of perspectives builds mutual respect and a more holistic understanding of the enterprise.

What indicators can boards monitor to detect breakdowns in communication?

Boards can look for both formal and informal indicators to detect communication failures before they escalate.

Formal Indicators Breakdowns often become apparent through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that seem out of sync. For example:

Production is significantly outpacing sales, suggesting a disconnect between operations and market demand.
Volatility in the cost of goods sold is not being reflected in the company’s pricing strategy, indicating a failure to communicate between finance, procurement, and sales.

Informal Indicators Sometimes, smaller, cultural indicators are just as important. These can be observed during site visits and in discussions about organizational culture:

A lack of social engagement between different departments.
Physical separation in informal settings, such as employees from different departments consistently sitting in separate corners of the company cafeteria.
The use of dismissive or derisive language by one department when referring to another.
Internal competition between teams (e.g., rival sales teams) that discourages the sharing of valuable information for the enterprise’s overall benefit.

Beyond simply monitoring these indicators, leaders can proactively model the desired behavior. Christopher Stitt shared a personal practice of rarely eating lunch at his desk, instead using that time to deliberately seek out colleagues from other departments in the cafeteria. Building these informal, social relationships creates channels of communication that prevent silos from hardening in the first place, making it easier to collaborate on formal business matters later.

How can boards ensure risk appetite is understood and applied by mid-level managers?

Boards can assess this alignment through a combination of reviewing formal reports and examining the cultural artifacts of internal communication. When reviewing reports, boards should analyze not just the opportunities the company acted upon, but also the opportunities that were identified but missed.

Understanding the rationale behind decisions to not act can reveal how risk appetite is being interpreted at the operational level.

To see how the message is being delivered, boards should also examine specific artifacts like prepared leadership remarks, transcripts from company-wide town hall meetings, and the curriculum and content of risk management training programs.

For a more structured assessment, the “Organizational Risk Culture Standard,” available at no cost at riskculture.org, is a powerful tool. Authored by a multi-disciplinary group of global experts, including specialists in social science, organizational psychology, and information risk, this standard allows an organization to measure how well its risk management culture is embedded across 10 different dimensions and provides strategies for improvement.

What is the role of mid-level leaders in risk identification?

The “muddy middle” is where “the rubber really meets the road.”

It is at this level that high-level company goals are translated into concrete action, and it is also where operational risk first becomes apparent. Three distinct phenomena occur within this layer:

Threats Become Apparent: This is the first line of detection for issues like supply chain disruptions, missed sales targets, or difficulties with payment collections.
Opportunities Emerge: Mid-level teams are often the first to discover new, cheaper suppliers, identify an opening in a new market, or see a marketing campaign unexpectedly go viral.
Uncertainty Increases: Positive and negative events can create new complexity. For example, a viral marketing campaign is a great opportunity, but it immediately raises a new uncertainty: can the supply chain and production lines keep up with the sudden surge in demand?

Mid-level leaders are therefore critical for identifying these changes early and communicating them upward so they can be monitored and acted upon.

How can organizations promote accountability without increasing bureaucracy?

It is critical to first reframe the concept of bureaucracy itself. Bureaucracy is not inherently bad; in fact, it is “the engine that drives our modern society,” encompassing the policies, procedures, and repeatable processes that allow organizations to function at scale. The goal of a good governance structure is not to eliminate bureaucracy but to perfect it, making processes more effective and efficient rather than just adding layers.

A simple but powerful three-part model can be used to develop leaders and strengthen governance efficiently, fostering accountability through empowerment rather than rigid control.

Training: Give people opportunities to understand how the organization’s processes work and, crucially, what their specific role is within them. This builds a foundation of knowledge and context.
Shadowing: Have senior leaders take junior staff with them to high-level meetings. This practice exposes developing leaders to strategic interactions and decision-making, providing invaluable insight into how the upper levels of the organization operate.
Appropriate Empowerment: Give staff the authority to make decisions—and even to make wrong decisions—at a level that will not cause catastrophic failure. This approach creates powerful learning experiences and builds confidence, turning mistakes into lessons rather than disasters.

Beyond metrics, how can the true effectiveness of governance be assessed?

Top-line metrics like profitability can be deceptive, potentially hiding underlying weaknesses in strategy or culture. One of the most useful tools for assessing the true effectiveness of governance, especially in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and digitized (VUCAD) business environment, is the tabletop exercise.

Often associated with crisis preparation, a tabletop exercise is fundamentally a “facilitated conversation” that can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. By working through “what-if” situations—such as a new market opportunity, a supply chain disruption, or a product launch—these exercises are incredibly effective at:

Uncovering gaps in planning and strategy.
Revealing misunderstandings about roles and responsibilities.
Ensuring strategic alignment across different departments.

For instance, an anecdote was shared about a U.S. State Department working group on risk management where a facilitated discussion revealed that members from different departments were using the exact same risk terminology but with entirely different meanings. Uncovering this misalignment was critical to developing a cohesive and effective policy.

How can leaders identify and leverage informal power structures within the organization?

While boards must be careful to avoid interfering in daily management, managers on the ground can and should identify and engage with informal leaders.

Implement 360-Degree Reviews: Getting feedback from a manager’s supervisors, peers, and subordinates provides a holistic view of their impact. This process helps identify true influencers and can expose “corporate psychopaths”—individuals who manage up effectively but are toxic to their teams and peers.
Identify the “Alphas”: Drawing from the “Tribal Leadership” model, every team or group has informal leaders, or “alphas,” to whom others naturally defer. Managers should observe team interactions to identify these individuals. Once identified, managers can engage these alphas to help communicate the vision, build support for new initiatives, and provide candid feedback on team morale.

How does cross-level leadership contribute to long-term resilience?

Succession planning cannot be limited to the C-suite. It is a discipline that must be applied at all levels of the organization to mitigate “key person risk.”
Leaders must operate with the team they have on the field today, not the one they wish they had. The organization must be prepared to function effectively when individuals are unavailable due to vacation, health issues, or unexpected turnover.
The core responsibility of any leader is “to develop the talent around them and effectively groom their own replacement.” Leaders who make themselves indispensable ultimately become a single point of failure.
By ensuring that knowledge is shared and that team members are constantly being developed, the organization can continue to function smoothly even when critical individuals are unavailable, thereby creating true and lasting resilience.

Glossary of Key Terms

Term / Name	Definition
360 Degree Process	An employee review system where leaders are rated by superiors, peers, and supervisees to provide a comprehensive view of their performance and identify potential issues.
Bridging Pyramids Within Pyramids	The title of the webinar and the central theme, referring to the strategy of connecting the multiple layers of authority and influence (“smaller pyramids”) that exist within a larger organizational hierarchy to strengthen trust and alignment.
Bureaucracy	Defined not as an inherently bad system, but as the engine of modern society, encompassing the policies, procedures, and repeatable processes that drive an organization. A good bureaucrat seeks to make these processes more effective and efficient.
Christopher Stitt	The guest speaker, a leadership expert, author, and founder of Crisis Lead. He is a former special agent with the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service with over 25 years of expertise in security, risk management, and crisis leadership.
Corporate Psychopaths	A term used to describe individuals in an organization who are willing to do anything for advancement, even at the expense of their team, colleagues, or the company itself.
Crisis Lead	The company founded by Christopher Stitt in 2023.
Cross-collaboration	The practice of encouraging communication and joint work between different teams and departments (verticals) at all levels of an organization to prevent silos and foster a holistic understanding of the enterprise.
Governance	The system by which an organization is directed and controlled. The webinar emphasizes that effective governance flows from connected systems and behaviors across all levels, not just from top-level policies.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)	Metrics used to measure performance. The webinar notes that KPIs, such as production outpacing sales, can be an indicator of breakdowns in cross-level communication.
Key Person Risk	The risk an organization faces when a single individual holds critical information or skills, and their absence (due to vacation, illness, etc.) could disrupt operations.
Muddy Middle	A term for the mid-level management layer of an organization where strategy is translated into action. It is where operational risks, threats, and opportunities often become apparent first.
Organizational Risk Culture Standard	An open-source standard, available at riskculture.org, that allows an organization to measure how well risk management is embedded in its culture across 10 different dimensions.
Professor Sezer Bozkus	The host of the webinar, and Chief Editor of the Advances in Corporate Governance Journal.
Risk	Defined as “the effect of uncertainty on objectives.” It is noted that risk itself is neither inherently good nor bad.
Risk Appetite	The level of risk an organization is willing to accept in pursuit of its strategic objectives. The webinar discusses the importance of ensuring the risk appetite is understood and applied consistently by mid-level management.
Scaling Pyramids	The title of Christopher Stitt’s book, subtitled “leadership lessons from a mid-level bureaucrat,” which covers leading oneself, leading others, and leading organizations from the middle of a hierarchy.
Silos	A phenomenon that occurs when the walls of organizational pyramids become too thick, inhibiting communication and collaboration between different operational units or departments.
Succession Planning	The process of identifying and developing internal talent to fill key leadership positions in the future. The webinar stresses this should be done at all levels, not just the C-suite, to ensure organizational resilience.
Tabletop Exercises	Facilitated conversations or workshops that use “what-if” scenarios to assess plans, strategies, and alignment. They are useful for uncovering gaps and misunderstandings beyond just crisis preparedness.
Tribal Leadership	A model mentioned in the webinar that posits any organization of 30 to 150 people forms its own subculture or “tribe.” These tribes are influenced by small groups (dyads and triads) and informal leaders.
VUCAD World	An acronym for a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous, and Digitized world. This environment necessitates rapid, informed decision-making and organizational resilience.