The Culture Conversations to Have With Clients

Know this client? They swear their team is fine, and meanwhile two departments haven't spoken to each other in months. By the time it lands on your desk, the silo has already been forming for a while, and the client usually can't see it themselves.

On the Fractional COOs to the Rescue podcast, Jen Hamilton sat down with Camille Soleil, Fractional COO, founder of Soleil Solutions, and a longtime nonprofit and behavioral health executive leader. Camille has spent over a decade inside organizations where culture and mission are supposed to be inseparable, which makes her read on silos especially useful for anyone doing this work with clients.

The Warning Sign on the Door

Camille named something early in our conversation that's worth building into your own diagnostic process.

If there's a warning sign on somebody's door, where you can't go into that door and talk to them about something, then that's a sign to me that something's going on that's challenging for the organization. - Camille Soleil

Not a formal complaint, not a resignation. It’s the moment people stop feeling safe enough to walk into a colleague's office and ask a question. 

Once that sign goes up, they stop bringing ideas forward and start protecting their own turf instead of building something together. If you're looking for where to start a culture conversation with a client, this is a more concrete entry point than asking generically "how's the team doing."

The Uncomfortable Diagnostic: Your Client's Best Performer

Here's the part of this conversation most worth bringing into your next client engagement. The person causing the silo is often not the underperformer. It's the one hitting every number, never missing a deadline, and refusing to collaborate because they already know the answer.

Camille has watched entire teams get taken down by exactly this pattern. High output. Zero trust. And leaders too afraid to touch it because the numbers look good on paper.

This is a useful question to bring into your own client conversations directly: is there someone on this team everyone else quietly works around? Most owners will hesitate before answering, and that hesitation is data.

Get Honest Before You Get Directive

Camille's approach isn't to fire someone as a way to stop silos. It's to get the client honest first, and this is where your role as the operational partner matters.

Two questions worth asking a client directly: 

1. Do they actually know what culture they want?
2. Have they told the team what collaboration looks like, out loud, specifically? 

Most leaders assume culture will take care of itself. It won't, and naming that gap is often the first real intervention you can make.

If an honest conversation doesn't move the person causing the silo, Camille's next step is direct: clear expectations, documented, with a real chance to change. If that doesn't work, the client owes the rest of the team a harder decision.

You have to be okay with being mission-focused and driven in a positive way, with the right people on the ship going with you. - Camille Soleil

Letting someone go, done right, is often the compassionate choice, not the cold one. Camille has had people thank her for it months later, once they landed somewhere they actually fit. That reframe, from cold decision to compassionate one, is worth having ready the next time a client is avoiding this exact call.

A Diagnostic That Costs Nothing

You don't have to start with a firing to start fixing a silo. Camille's simplest fix is something you can hand a client today: ask one team member what their win was since you last spoke. Two minutes, and the disconnects start surfacing before they turn into real damage.

This connects directly to Team, one of the six pillars our Certified Fractional COOs use to evaluate a business's health. Role clarity and accountability aren't a nice-to-have sitting next to culture work. They're the mechanism that determines whether a team trusts each other or quietly protects itself, which means the silo conversation and the accountability conversation are usually the same conversation.

Bring This Into Your Next Client Engagement

Next time a client insists their team is fine, ask the question Camille asks: is there a door on this team nobody wants to knock on? If the answer is yes, or if the client has to think too long about it, you've found your starting point.

Camille and Jen covered more in the full episode, including cross-functional projects that force collaboration, hiring for emotional intelligence before skill, and why fun is an underrated tool for rebuilding connection across a team. Worth the listen before your next culture conversation with a client.