CoverStory
Editor’s Note: In September 2025, LTEN brought together a group of training leaders for the annual Learning Executive Forum, part of the Learning Executive Series of content and resources for senior professionals. Hector Baeza, a member of the LTEN Board of Directors and executive director of commercial learning and development for Gilead Sciences, moderated a discussion around silos, synergy and crossfunctional issues affecting training and leadership throughout organizations.
No matter the company or business unit, I keep encountering the same challenge: smart, well-intentioned teams that struggle to work with one another when the pressure is on. Everyone is “patient first,” everyone cares about quality and compliance, yet collaboration still feels harder than it should.
Over time that friction starts to look normal; just the cost of getting things done in a complex, regulated environment. It isn’t.
The distance between silos and synergy is smaller than most leaders think, and it is bridged less by new platforms or technology than by a handful of practical habits we can sponsor right now.
When collaboration wobbles, it is rarely because people don’t want to help. It is because communication gaps multiply at the seams. Different functions work on different cadences, speak different dialects of the same language and report to different dashboards.
Without a shared place to look for truth, meetings become translation exercises and decisions are made in the moment with the expectation of being able to change course later if needed. The result is a lot of talking about the work and not enough momentum in the work.
Misaligned objectives are another source of drag. Commercial, medical, marketing and operations all pursue legitimate goals, but the incentives that govern day-to-day decisions don’t always line up. A launch team can be perfectly “on plan” while a review committee, also operating as designed, reports delays or risks that are not necessarily accurate.
Neither side is wrong; the system is misaligned. Layer on competing priorities, quarterly targets, new hire classes we need to run and national sales meetings, and even well-framed initiatives can end up starving for attention at the precise moment they require it the most.
Another barrier is often a lack of clarity and accountability. We often define who is involved but not how we will behave when plans change.
In a matrix, ambiguity feels safe, no one owns the risk and decisions made can be changed based on new insights. But ambiguity is expensive. It breeds rework, late fire drills and decision churn that exhausts teams and delays value. If we want speed and quality, clarity and accountability must be non-negotiable and built into our system.
What turns the corner isn’t a new org chart, it is new habits. During a recent launch, we made a deliberate move with our commercial learning and development (L&D) team. Instead of joining a status meeting run by others, we created our own and invited the stakeholders we needed to drive decisions. We changed our seat at the table by creating our own table.
That single shift, owning the forum, allowed us to focus our energy and resources on the problem in front of us, not the scope creep that can sometimes accompany these types of meetings. People showed up ready to decide rather than to report.
Inside that forum, we moved beyond a DAI (Decide, Advise, Inform) model and made accountability explicit. Every decision carried a named owner, every project had a clearly accountable lead. When a topic needed input from multiple functions, we captured who would advise, who would execute and who would be kept informed, but we never left ownership implied.
That clarity accelerated everything, questions went to the right person the first time, trade-offs were surfaced early, risks were escalated before they hardened into issues. And we publicly thanked those that were tasked with making decisions when decisions were made.
We also put a deceptively simple artifact at the center, a deck that housed our launch plans and lived where every key stakeholder could access it. It wasn’t a static binder, it was a living pane of truth. Timelines, dependencies, open decisions, risk logs, meeting notes and owners all sat in one place. Information began to flow quickly and accurately across teams. You didn’t have to wait a week to ask a question or chase five people on email. Review the deck and odds were the answer, or the owner, was already there.
Every meeting began with action items from the previous one. We closed the loop before opening new topics, which trained the organization to take commitments seriously. A decision made in that room would immediately be accessible to all as a firm commitment. And when we needed to escalate, it wasn’t a failure of the team, it was part of the process. The format made it easy to summarize the context, the options and the recommended call. Decisions stopped stalling in the middle and started landing where they belonged.
Communication with senior leadership was the final multiplier. We scheduled frequent check-ins to provide a 35,000-foot view of the plan: what had moved, where we were blocked and what decisions were coming next. Leaders appreciated the altitude, high-level enough to scan quickly, concrete enough to dive in when they had specific questions. Because the deck was always current, those check-ins became conversations, not presentations, and follow-up was faster and cleaner.
One small, personal proof point, at 2 a.m., when a question nagged at me about a training dependency, I opened the shared document on my phone. The answer was already there, logged, dated and owned. That is what alignment feels like in practice, fewer late-night messages, fewer “who owns this?” threads, more forward motion because the system we put in place makes the right thing the easy thing.
None of this is exotic. Start a forum you control. Name the accountable owner for every decision and every deliverable. Put a living plan where everyone can see it. Open each meeting by closing the last one. Normalize escalation as a healthy step, not a last-ditch move. Keep leaders in the loop with concise, regular views at the right altitude. These are small choices, but they compound. They reduce ambiguity, shorten feedback loops and substitute shared truth for opinion.
Alignment is a moment; synergy is a system. Alignment says “we agree, for now.” Synergy makes it easy, and eventually inevitable, to work well together because the outcomes are co-owned, the language is shared, the rhythms are predictable and the data is visible.
When we, as L&D leaders, model these habits and invite our partners to co-own them, we convert cross-functional good will into real velocity. That’s the journey from silos to synergy, not a slogan or a one-time workshop, but a system of simple, repeatable choices that turn shared purpose into shared results.
Remember, synergy is built through small, repeatable choices — start today and watch the impact grow.
Hector Baeza is executive director, commercial learning and development, for Gilead Sciences, and a member of the LTEN Board of Directors. Email Hector at hector.baeza@gilead.com.
