Leaning into Leadership – Podcast Episode #2

Many of the most important challenges we all face are complex. They need us to address issues which are at least partly outside our direct control.

Welcome to Leaning into Leadership, a series exploring the forces reshaping leadership across Australian businesses and government. In this episode, we explore leadership across organisational boundaries.

Whether the challenge is housing, health, infrastructure, or customer service, we often find that leaders need to collaborate with other organisations, or other divisions.

That leaves leaders needing to influence people they do not manage, reconcile different mandates, and build trust without relying on hierarchy. Yet organisational structures, budgets, and performance systems still tend to build accountability and rewards around silos.

Joining us for this podcast episode are Rory Gregg from SpencerMaurice, and Claire McKendrick from Unbounded Leadership.

In this podcast discussion, we explore how to escape the silo, why relationships and shared purpose often outperform formal structures, and consider what practical leadership looks like when accountability is distributed.

You can watch the video on Youtube, or continue reading below.

Rory Gregg:
Can we start by getting your perspective around this notion of leading beyond organisational boundaries? How do we escape the silo thinking?

Claire McKendrick:
If you look at the types of situations facing leaders, the level of complexity is increasing, and it is becoming more evident that we need to collaborate to make progress.

But this collaboration is also becoming more challenging.

If you look at, for example, the 2026 Edelman Trust Index, it is talking about the increasing insularity that we’re observing across society. There are range of other reports that also indicate that polarisation is increasing.

So how can we start to make progress on these complex challenges, or really shift the dial. Especially when it requires more than one leader, or more than one organisation to achieve your goals.

The answer may be that the solution may need contributions from a broader ecosystem of people and partners.

Correspondingly, larger organisations often face these issues internally. Because they tend to be structurally organised in a vertical way, with discrete silos of accountability.

Rory Gregg:
So the way that most organisations are managed today is very vertical. I think the challenge for many organisations and leaders is being able to almost turn that approach on its head, and think quite differently around those silos and boundaries.

Where we have seen leaders be very effective, it has often been the result of their ability to influence and shape agendas and events beyond their own direct sphere of control.

Claire McKendrick:
Exactly.

Rory Gregg:
When we look at the tension that exists between vertical accountability and horizontal collaboration, how do you see that resolving?

Claire McKendrick:
I think part of the challenge is that leaders forget that the vertical organisational boundary, the silo, is just a social construct.

Organisational structure is just a way of organising our work, and is not fixed or set in stone.

So what often happens, is that leaders forget that structure is dynamic. They assume that structure is static, they optimise just for their part, and forget that they are part of a larger system.

Leaders can become very narrowly focused on their own team, their own part of the system, and become disconnected from the consumer, the person, and from the whole.

In the public sector, there is often a strong emphasis on public value, and consideration of outcomes for citizens, the country, the state. But even when that larger public value perspective is being considered, the individual consumer, the needs of the individual person may be forgotten.

Sometimes when teams optimise for their part of the system, there can be serious consequences for other parts of the organisation, or external stakeholders.

Leaders who have take a more collaborative approach, might consider the wider impacts outside their silo, and come up with a different solution that minimises the harms to the stakeholders.

Rory Gregg:
We often see the consequences of silo based thinking when we carry out independent reviews.

Leaders who are effective typically put a lot of effort into building trust amongst their team and their stakeholders.

If we are trying to discourage silo based leadership and decision making, how do you think governance needs to be adjusted?

Claire McKendrick:
Trust really gets to the heart of the matter.

The quality of relationships and the quality of conversation that leaders are able to have. The capacity to be able to work with different perspectives and interests. These are key qualities that enable people to start to see what is at stake for others, and to start to work more effectively together.

These are the types of things which enable people to work more effectively in situations with different competing interests, and collaborate across differences. As opposed to forming competitive relationships with people.

Regarding governance models, I sometimes wonder whether we rely too heavily on governance, rather than building a stronger relationship with other teams, or other stakeholders.

I often hear leadership teams complaining about the organisational structure itself, and blaming it as being the issue. In reality, it is the relationships that those leaders form outside their silo which are more likely to determine their success.

Rory Gregg:
There is a temptation sometimes to try to solve these management issues in a structural way, rather than considering non-tangible elements like trust.

It is important for leaders to acknowledge that there is a tension that will exist around the competing interests. That the silo based structures and accountability will potentially lead to harmful decisions, that create negative outcomes for customers and external stakeholders.

Rory Gregg:
Claire, what have your conversations with successful leaders taught you about the difference between influence and control, from a leadership perspective?

Claire McKendrick:
The importance of experimenting, and being willing to acknowledge what we don’t know.

Experimenting can be simple. For a situation where there is a roadblock, it might be as simple as gathering some new information, or listening carefully to feedback from a key stakeholder. Then considering how to do things another way, or have a different style of conversation, to enable you to move things forward.