Many laboratory teams work under the same roof but function as separate units. Chemistry, biology, biotech, pathology, nursing, regional sites, and other groups may each have their own workflows, pressures, and habits. Over time, those differences can harden into silos.
The challenge is that the organization needs people to collaborate, but the culture has taught them to stay in their lanes.
During a panel discussion at the 2026 Lab Manager Leadership Summit, moderated by Scott Hanton, panelists Melissa Duong, Dwayne Henry, and April Day discussed how lab leaders can influence alignment across teams. One audience member described leading a team where chemistry and biology staff often worked in separate silos. The question was not simply how to make people get along, but how to build resilience, improve team dynamics, and move people toward a shared vision when they were used to operating separately.
Dwayne Henry, instructional lab manager for chemical and biological sciences at Montgomery College, said he had faced a similar issue across biology, chemistry, and biotech. His approach was to stop reinforcing the separation. He did not hold separate formal meetings for each discipline when the information affected the whole group. Instead, formal meetings, correspondence, and broader updates included everyone.
Sounds simple, right? But if every formal communication divides the team by discipline, the manager reinforces the idea that each group has separate priorities. If shared information reaches everyone together, the team starts to see itself as part of a larger operation.
Henry also used cross-training to build familiarity. When chemistry had a new GC-MS, he involved the biology and biotech staff. When microbiology had new equipment, chemistry staff were included as well. The goal was not to make every person an expert in every area. It was to give team members exposure to one another’s work and reduce the sense that another department’s responsibilities were completely separate from their own.
Over time, Henry said, the groups became used to being around one another. What started as intentional structure eventually became part of the culture. He also described occasionally asking someone from chemistry to help with a biology-related need, or vice versa, when appropriate. Those small interactions helped create more organic collaboration.
Collaboration does not always begin with a large team-building exercise or a formal culture initiative. It can begin with small operational choices: who gets invited to a meeting, who receives an update, who participates in training, and who gets asked to help solve a problem.
Melissa Duong, who was transitioning from associate director of anatomic pathology at Penn Medicine to AVP of pathology services at Adventist HealthCare, suggested starting with the people most likely to support collaboration. Rather than trying to shift the whole group at once, she recommended identifying one person from each side who is less resistant to working together. Those individuals can help set the tone in meetings and model the behavior the manager wants to see.
That approach keeps the effort manageable. A manager does not need every person to become an advocate at the start. A few cooperative voices can make collaboration feel less like a top-down demand and more like an emerging team norm.
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April Day, senior director for clinical pathology at Geisinger Health System, added another strategy: shared accountability. She described assigning joint goals where leaders or teams could not succeed unless they worked together. In one example, laboratory and emergency department leaders were given a shared metric. Their performance depended on understanding each other’s barriers and solving the problem together.
Day said this kind of structure helped change the language from “the lab” and “nursing” to “we.” That shift matters because silos often survive through language as much as workflow. When teams talk about each other as separate obstacles, collaboration is fragile. When they share ownership of an outcome, they start to see the problem differently.
The lesson here is that leaders can encourage teamwork, but they also need to design routines, goals, and accountability systems that make collaboration the practical path forward.
Silos don’t typically disappear because a manager asks people to be more collaborative. They begin to weaken when teams share information, learn about one another’s work, participate in joint problem-solving, and succeed or struggle together. Over time, those repeated interactions can turn separate groups into a stronger, more resilient lab team.
This article was created with the assistance of Generative AI and has undergone editorial review before publishing.
