How to Get Departments to Actually Coordinate on a Shared Goal

June 2, 2026 6 min read Marlysa D. Gamblin, GamblinConsults

Why do departments operate in siloes?

Marlysa D. Gamblin, MPP, Institutional Strategy Consultant, has supported policy directors, program officers, and legislative offices in translating community data into recommendations that get approved and implemented. She has strategically advised city offices, legislative oversight bodies, and national nonprofits on turning community data into policy that gets approved and implemented, explains how to close the gap between data and decision.

If you have ever asked yourself why departments will not coordinate, you are not alone. It is one of the most common frustrations among city managers, department directors, and nonprofit executives. And it is almost never about the people.

Departments that operate in silos do not do so because staff do not care about the mission. They do it because the systems, structures, and incentives around them reward protecting their lane over sharing it. Fixing coordination is not a people problem. It is a design problem.

Why Departments Stop Talking to Each Other?

Most coordination failures come back to the same structural causes:

1. No shared accountability. Each department has its own goals, its own metrics, and its own budget. There is no mechanism that makes cross-departmental success anyone's individual responsibility.

   
   

2. Overlapping or conflicting mandates. Two departments are both responsible for something and neither knows which one owns the decision. So both avoid making it.

   
   

3. Leadership does not model coordination. If senior leaders are not visibly working across their own silos, middle management will not either.Information does not flow.

   
   

4. Teams do not know what other departments are working on, which creates duplication, missed handoffs, and reactive friction.

   
   

5. More meetings were added instead of systems. Coordination meetings without clear roles and shared ownership just add to the exhaustion without producing movement.

What Does Coordination Actually Requires?

Coordination is not a communication problem. You cannot fix it with more meetings, more email threads, or a shared dashboard that nobody updates. Real coordination requires structural conditions that make working together easier than working alone. Those conditions include:

1. Shared goals with shared accountability. At least one priority that both departments are responsible for and measured on together.

   
   

2. Clear decision authority. When decisions cross departmental lines, someone has to own them. That ownership needs to be named, not assumed.

   
   

3. Visible leadership alignment. Senior leaders working across their own boundaries publicly give permission to the rest of the organization to do the same.

   
   

4. A feedback loop that is actually used. Regular check-ins where cross-departmental progress is reviewed and adjustments are made, not just reported.

What is the Question Most Leaders Are Not Asking?

The most useful question is not how do we get departments to coordinate. It is: what does the current system reward? If every department is evaluated, budgeted, and promoted independently, coordination will always feel like extra work on top of real work.

The system is producing exactly the behavior it was designed to produce. Changing that requires redesigning the incentives, the accountability structures, and the shared goals, not adding another task force.

Where Do We Actually Start?

Pick one shared priority. Identify the two or three departments that are most critical to moving it. Define what each department is responsible for, what decision authority each holds, and how you will all know if things are working. Make that agreement visible to the teams carrying the work.

That structure, applied to one real priority, will do more for cross-department collaboration than any offsite or communication training ever will.

GamblinConsults helps governments, nonprofits, and universities stop launching plans that go nowhere and start building the systems and teams that actually make change stick.