Who Told You That Wasn't Your Job? A Look at the Walls We Build Ourselves

TL;DR

Nicole Hollar, behavior change keynote speaker and coach, breaks down why "that's not my part of the project" is almost never actually about the org chart. Companies get blamed for building silos, but a lot of the wall-building happens person by person, decision by decision, long before leadership ever draws a box on a chart. If you want to know where your power went, look at what you've quietly agreed isn't yours to touch.

There's a popular explanation floating around leadership circles right now: teams don't collaborate because companies build walls between departments. Design finishes its part, throws it over the fence to engineering, engineering throws it to marketing, and everybody waits their turn instead of working together from day one. Fix the structure, the thinking goes, and you fix the behavior.

I don't disagree that bad structure makes bad behavior easier. But I want to push on something underneath that explanation, because I think it lets a lot of individual people off the hook a little too easily.

Structure doesn't build a wall by itself. People build it, one small refusal at a time.

"That's not my part" is a sentence, not a policy.

Nobody's contract says, "You are permitted to stop caring about this project the moment your section is finished." That's a decision someone made, probably because it felt easier, safer, or more comfortable than staying involved in something messy and not fully yours to control.

I see this constantly in coaching, and it's rarely malicious. It's someone who got burned once for speaking up outside their lane. Someone who was told, directly or indirectly, to stay in their box. Someone who genuinely believes contributing beyond their assigned piece will be read as overstepping.

That's a real fear. It's also a choice being made every single day, and choices are where personal agency lives.

Ownership isn't a job description. It's a decision you keep making.

One of the five principles I coach people through is Ownership — recognizing your part in a situation, separate from everyone else's part. Ownership doesn't mean you're responsible for the whole project. It means you stop pretending you had zero influence over how your piece of it landed, and zero ability to flag something before it became someone else's mess.

If an engineer notices marketing is going to struggle with a design decision and says nothing because "that's their problem now," that's not a structural failure. That's a person choosing silence because it's less friction. It's a small transaction where they traded influence for comfort.

Multiply that transaction by a few hundred employees over a few years, and now you have "corporate culture." The wall didn't build itself. Everyone helped, one shrug at a time.

Where you actually have power in a walled-off system.

You may not control the org chart. You probably can't redesign how your company hands off projects between departments. That part is legitimately outside your control, and pretending otherwise is a waste of energy.

But you do control whether you flag the thing you noticed. You control whether you ask the question in the room instead of at your desk afterward. You control whether you treat your piece of the project as a contribution to something bigger, or as a task you're relieved to be done with.

That's the distinction I keep coming back to with clients: know what's genuinely not yours to fix, and stop quietly abandoning the parts that are.

Questions for Reflection

1. Where have you told yourself "that's not my part" recently — and was that actually true, or just more comfortable to believe?
2. Think of a time you noticed a problem forming outside your lane and said nothing. What were you protecting by staying quiet?
3. If you stopped waiting for permission to weigh in beyond your assigned piece, what's the worst realistic outcome — and is it actually worse than the current one?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it wrong to stay in your lane at work?
Not inherently. Boundaries around scope are healthy and necessary, especially in complex projects. The distinction is between a boundary you've thoughtfully set and a habit of disengagement you've never examined. One protects your time and focus; the other quietly erodes trust and collaboration.

How is this different from just blaming employees for a bad culture?
It's not about blame. Company structure absolutely shapes behavior, and leaders are responsible for that. But personal agency asks a separate question: within whatever structure exists, where do individuals still have a choice to speak up, contribute, or disengage? Both things are true at once.

What's the first step to breaking a personal pattern of disengagement at work?
Start by getting honest about what's actually driving it — fear of overstepping, past experience of being shut down, or genuine lack of interest. Naming the real reason is more useful than generic advice to "speak up more," because the fix depends entirely on what's underneath it.