Our sales director and operations director seem to get along great in public, but behind closed doors, they are constantly blaming each other to their staff, which is creating a toxic divide between our sales and delivery teams. How do we surface this subterranean peer conflict and force them to resolve it?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Cracks at the leadership team level appear as canyons to the rest of the organization. When your sales and operations directors play nice in meetings but talk trash to their respective teams, they are destroying trust and actively sabotaging your operations. You must shut this down immediately.

Start by addressing the lack of vulnerability based trust. In your next leadership team session, put this issue at the top of your IDS list. Call out the behavior directly. Let them know that their subterranean conflict is visible and is damaging company morale and efficiency.

Force them to sit down together and use the Issue Resolution Tool. They must identify the root cause of their friction, which is usually a lack of clear agreement on handoffs or unrealistic expectations. They need to solve the issue for the long term good of the company, not just agree to a temporary truce.

Establish a clear rule for the entire leadership team: you support the decision or you debate it, but once a decision is made, you support it 100 percent outside the room. If a leader speaks negatively about a peer to their direct reports, it is a core values violation. Hold them accountable to this standard. If they cannot resolve their differences and protect team unity, one or both of them must be replaced before you can prepare your business for a clean, highly valued exit.