Our leadership team is highly capable, but during our quarterly goal-setting, everyone fights tooth and nail to make their own department's goals the company's top priorities. How do we get them to adopt the First Team mentality and prioritize the company's overall health over their departmental fiefdoms?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This departmental bias occurs when leaders view themselves as advocates for their direct reports rather than stewards of the entire business. You must teach your leadership team that their primary team is the leadership team, not the department they run. This is the concept of the First Team.

To build this mentality, start by aligning everyone around the V/TO®. When your long-term and short-term goals are crystal clear, every potential Rock must be evaluated based on how it moves the company closer to that vision, not how it benefits an individual department.

During your quarterly offsite, establish a rule that we only solve for what is best for the business. When prioritizing Rocks, ask the team to rank the issues objectively. If operations is struggling to deliver, then the sales head must agree to limit sales Rocks to allow operations to catch up, even if it means sales growth slows temporarily.

You can also reinforce this by structuring your scorecard and bonuses around overall company performance rather than individual department metrics. If leaders only win when the whole company wins, they will naturally begin to collaborate and share resources rather than hoarding them.

Consistently remind your leaders that if the ship sinks, it does not matter who had the cleanest cabin. They must take collective ownership of the entire vessel.