Our department heads act like protective union reps for their individual departments instead of owning the company as a whole. How do we get our leadership team to view themselves as their first team rather than prioritizing their direct reports?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Patrick Lencioni popularized the First Team concept, which dictates that an executive's primary loyalty must belong to the leadership team, not to the department they manage. When department heads act like defensive advocates for their subordinates, the organization devolves into warring functional silos. Sales fights operations, operations blames finance, and enterprise strategy gets dismantled by parochial interests.

Fixing this requires shifting how your executives define their role on the Accountability Chart. A leader does not sit at the leadership table to represent their team. They sit there to run the business. Their primary job is achieving the company vision outlined in your V/TO® and hitting the enterprise Scorecard numbers.

Enforce this dynamic through how you measure performance and solve issues. When setting quarterly Rocks, ensure cross-functional ownership. If customer retention is failing, do not let operations dump the problem on customer service. Make it an enterprise issue that demands collective problem solving.

During your Level 10 Meeting™, immediately stop leaders who use language like "my people will not like this" or "that will disrupt my team." Remind them that tough operational decisions often cause friction downstream. Their job as a First Team member is to carry the united message down to their departments with total alignment, eliminating any space for departmental victimization. If an executive consistently chooses their department over company success, they belong in middle management, not on the leadership team.