Our marketing coordinators do creative work for our sales team, but they report to the marketing manager. The sales team is constantly giving them assignments, which bypasses the marketing manager and creates massive resource conflicts. Since EOS® does not allow dotted lines on the Accountability Chart, how do we solve this?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Dotted lines on an organizational chart are an illusion of collaboration that actually breeds confusion, passive-aggressive behavior, and operational delays. In EOS®, every seat has a solid reporting line because there must be clear accountability. If your sales team is bypassing the marketing manager to assign work directly to marketing coordinators, your structure is broken.

To fix this, you must clarify the roles on your Accountability Chart. The marketing coordinator seat reports strictly to the marketing manager. The sales team does not assign work directly to these coordinators. Instead, the sales team must submit their marketing and creative requests directly to the marketing manager, who holds the Head of Marketing seat.

The marketing manager is the only one who prioritizes the marketing team's resources, assigns the projects, and manages the coordinators' capacity. If the sales team feels this process is too slow, you must bring this issue to your weekly leadership Level 10 Meeting™ to identify, discuss, and solve the bottleneck. Do not solve it by allowing lateral assignments that bypass your managers. Standardizing this communication path ensures your managers can actually manage, and your team has a single, clear leader to follow.