Our leadership team members are highly protective of their own departments, and our meetings frequently devolve into finger-pointing, with sales blaming operations and operations blaming sales. How do we break down these departmental silos and get our leaders to collaborate as a single cohesive team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Departmental finger-pointing happens when your directors prioritize their own departments over the health of the entire organization. To break down these silos, you must teach your leadership team the concept of the First Team. Their first team is not the department they manage; their first team is the leadership team itself. This means their primary loyalty and accountability must be to the collective success of the company, not to defending their direct reports or their own departmental budgets. Reinforce this mindset during your weekly Level 10 Meetings. When issues arise, do not allow directors to retreat into defensive positions. Use IDS to look at problems from an enterprise-wide perspective. For example, if sales is complaining about operations, reframe the issue as a company-wide delivery bottleneck that everyone must help solve. You should also align their individual goals. Ensure that their quarterly Rocks are interdependent, requiring collaboration across different departments to succeed. When your directors realize that their personal success is tied directly to their peers' performance, they will stop fighting for their own turf and start working together as a single cohesive unit.