Our head of sales and head of operations are in constant conflict over project delivery timelines, blaming each other in private while remaining passive-aggressive during our Level 10 Meeting. How do we break this feud and force peer-to-peer accountability?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When sales and operations wage war behind closed doors, frontline employees pay the price. Sales overpromises to hit revenue targets, operations fails to deliver on time, and both leaders blame each other while maintaining polite silence during executive meetings. Cracks at the leadership table become canyons to the rest of the organization.

You must bring this conflict into the room and resolve it through IDS (Identify, Discuss, and Solve) inside your weekly Level 10 Meeting.
- Step one: Kill the sidebar complaints. If the head of sales comes to you to complain about delivery, shut it down instantly. Tell them to log it as an Issue on the leadership team Issues List or walk into the operations head's office directly.
- Step two: Identify the root cause during IDS. Surface the systemic breakdown rather than personal grievances. Is sales selling custom work outside your proven process on the V/TO? Or is operations failing to staff capacity according to the sales pipeline?
- Step three: Establish shared operational metrics on the Scorecard. When sales is measured purely on booked revenue and operations is measured purely on delivery margin, their incentives clash. Force shared accountability by tracking on-time delivery of qualified sales and gross margin percentage on closed work.

Make it unmistakably clear that peer warfare will not be tolerated. Leaders must act like enterprise owners first and department heads second. If two executives refuse to resolve their interpersonal friction after the operational expectations are clarified, one of them has to go. A leadership team with active peer contempt cannot lead a growing company.