Ask Johnny: What Happens When “We” Becomes “I” at Work?

SHRM President and Chief Executive Officer Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, answers your workplace questions each week. Do you have a work-related question you’d like him to answer? Submit it here.

Departments within my organization are increasingly competing with one another by highlighting each other’s faults, and the mindset is shifting from “we” to “I.” This is affecting trust, collaboration, and overall performance. How can we reverse this trend and rebuild a culture of shared ownership and teamwork, moving people from silos back to "one team" thinking? — Ashrafuzzaman

Siloed behavior is one of the fastest ways to undermine an otherwise healthy organization. You can have the right strategy, strong talent, and ample resources, but if teams are working against each other, performance will suffer. Every time.

Let’s be clear: Organizations that fail to operate as one team will not reach their full potential. Internal competition that turns into finger-pointing isn’t healthy tension; it’s dysfunction.

So how do you reverse it? It starts at the top. What leaders model and what they tolerate sets the workplace culture. If senior leaders are protecting their own turf, competing for credit, or calling out failures without shared accountability, that behavior will cascade across the organization. Leadership must visibly reinforce a “one team” mindset through shared goals, cross-functional priorities, and consistent messaging that success is collective, not individual.

At the same time, that’s not an excuse for poor individual performance. A "one team" mindset doesn't mean shared accountability becomes a place to hide. High-performing organizations expect both: people who collaborate across boundaries and deliver individually. Organizations expect high performance and strong collaboration together; one doesn't excuse the absence of the other.

And expectations alone won’t sustain that balance — you have to reinforce them. This is where workplace incentives come into play. If you measure and reward departments in isolation, you’re unintentionally encouraging silos. Align performance metrics to enterprise outcomes. When you hold leaders accountable for shared results, collaboration stops being a suggestion and becomes a requirement.

It’s also important to address the environment you’ve created. In low-trust cultures, people protect themselves. They document, deflect, and blame. In high-trust cultures, people take ownership, even when things go wrong. That doesn’t happen by accident. It requires leaders who create clarity, encourage responsible risk-taking, and hold people accountable without defaulting to blame.

You can also get ahead of this through hiring and onboarding. Be explicit about expectations. Bring in people who value collaboration and who focus on team success, not just individual recognition. And reinforce those expectations early and often.

Finally, you need to connect all this to the bottom line. Business outcomes should be the unifying force. Leadership and HR need to make that connection unmistakable, helping employees see how shared success drives individual success. When teams operate as one, performance improves, opportunities expand, and the entire organization moves forward together.

Development Solution: Purposeful Leadership by SHRM Linkage