The Silo Effect: Why Your Team Isn’t Talking (And What the Hills Can Do About It)

The wind up on the ridges doesn’t care about your corporate hierarchy. It doesn’t care about department boundaries, project deadlines, or who owns which piece of the quarterly budget.
When you’re out in the hills, navigating a steep incline with the rain starting to threaten or the sun beating down on your shoulders, the corporate noise completely evaporates.

I was out there again last week with the team from Darke & Taylor.
We were out in the hills, putting the miles in, training for their big Autumn endurance event.
This wasn’t a one-off afternoon of mandatory fun. This was another deliberate step on a longer journey we’ve been taking together. And as I watched them move across the landscape, I caught myself smiling.

It is incredibly refreshing—and honestly, quite rare these days—to see a team who are sincerely, genuinely excited about a hike day. No one was dragging their heels. No one was checking their watch every twenty minutes to see when they could slip back to their car.

They were fully present. In the terrain. With each other.

But it was a comment from one of the senior leadership team during a brief pause at a viewpoint that really stood out to me. They looked back down the line of hikers, watched the groups mingling, and said:

"Ben, it’s just fantastic to hear people who don’t normally work in tandem chatting away like this. I just heard someone say, ‘Haven’t seen you since the last walk, how’s the family?’—Ben, those conversations simply do not happen in the normal, day-to-day operations of the workplace."

That single observation hits the nail squarely on the head.

​It reveals the invisible friction that is quietly draining the energy, culture, and collaborative power of almost every major business today.

What Happens When You Change the Environment

The Darke & Taylor culture is different. And it’s different because their leadership team fundamentally understands a truth that I have spent thirty years coaching across elite sports and high-performance corporate environments:

If you want people to think, act, and connect differently, you have to physically remove them from the environment that created the limitations in the first place.

When you get a group of people out into the hills, the entire dynamic shifts.

First, the physical pacing naturally dictates the social pacing. You cannot sprint up a hillside while keeping up a conversation. You have to settle into a rhythm. A steady, honest, human pace.

Second, the structural hierarchy disappears. The managing director is wearing the same waterproof jacket as the newest recruit. They are dealing with the exact same terrain, breathing the same air, and feeling the same physical effort in their legs.
Suddenly, the artificial barriers drop.

When you’re walking shoulder-to-shoulder—rather than staring face-to-face across a boardroom table or a Zoom screen—the pressure is off.
You don’t have to maintain eye contact. You don’t have to perform. You just walk.
And that is precisely when the real conversations begin.

Authentic Human Connection
You find out that the person from the accounts department is training for a marathon. You discover the site manager’s kid goes to the same school as yours. You hear about the family dog, the weekend DIY project, or the shared frustration of getting older and trying to stay fit.
"Haven’t seen you since the last walk, how’s the family?"

It sounds incredibly simple. Almost trivial. But it isn't.
Those micro-moments are the literal glue of a company culture.

They build the currency of trust. When those individuals return to the office on Monday morning, their working relationship is completely rewritten. The next time an issue arises between their departments, they don't fire off a defensive, passive-aggressive email. They pick up the phone. Or they walk across the corridor.
Because they aren't dealing with a department anymore. They are dealing with a person they shared a hill with.

The Death of the "Token" Team Building Day
Most corporate team building is, frankly, an absolute box-ticking exercise.
We have all seen it. Many of us have been forced to endure it. The human resources department decides the company needs a morale boost, so they book a token afternoon.
Perhaps it’s an awkward indoor trust-fall session in a drab hotel conference room. Maybe it's a frantic afternoon of go-karting where the naturally competitive people dominate and everyone else feels uncomfortable. Or worse, a forced night out at the local bar where people talk shop for two hours, drink too much, and head home with a hangover and zero added value.

It is a short-term plaster on a long-term cultural wound.

People see right through it. High-performing, intelligent staff don’t want token efforts. They don’t want mandatory fun that feels patronizing.

What the Darke & Taylor team is doing with Project Active is entirely different.
They aren't looking for a quick fix. They are investing in a progressive journey. They have set a major goal for the Autumn—a physical challenge that requires preparation, consistency, and shared effort.
The hike days aren't isolated events; they are milestones. They provide a shared narrative for the company. In the weeks between our walks, there is a quiet buzz in the workplace.

• "How’s your training going?"
• "Are you ready for the next ridge?"
• "Make sure you’ve got your boots broken in."

This is how you build an award-winning, forward-thinking business culture. You don't do it by talking about core values on a PowerPoint slide.

You do it by creating shared experiences that test character, build camaraderie, and develop better people.

A Question for Forward-Thinking Leaders
When I look at what Darke & Taylor are achieving (and I have been involved for ten years with them), it sets a gold standard. It shows what is possible when a business genuinely values its people enough to give them the space, the time, and the environment to grow together.

So, my question to you is straightforward:

Do you work for—or run—another forward-thinking, award-winning company like Darke & Taylor?

Do you want to develop better, healthier, more resilient people?
Or are you still relying on the same old token-effort staff team building days that leave everyone feeling slightly cynical?

If you are a business owner, a director, or an executive leader who looks at your current team and sees the creeping symptoms of the silo effect—the transactional emails, the department disconnect, the underlying fatigue—it might be time to change the landscape.

We don't do generic corporate packages. We don't do awkward icebreakers.
We design bespoke blueprints that combine physical challenge, outdoor adventure, and genuine team alignment to build a bulletproof company culture from the ground up.

Let's find out what your team is truly capable of when you take them out of the office and into the elements.

Let’s Have a Conversation
If you’re ready to move away from token efforts and want to build a real, lasting strategy for your team’s health, connection, and performance, let's talk.

No high-pressure sales pitch.
No obligation.

Just a straight, peer-to-peer discussion about your business, your people, and where you want to take them next.