My leadership team members constantly bypass our weekly IDS session to escalate their peer-to-peer operational disputes directly to me. How do I force them to resolve conflict among themselves without playing referee?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you act as a referee for your leadership team, you are enabling a hub-and-spoke management model that stunts your company growth. If your executives cannot resolve their peer conflicts independently, your business is entirely dependent on you. This dependency makes your company unsellable and prevents you from finding operational freedom.

You must break this habit immediately by refusing to entertain back-channel complaints. When a leadership team member comes to your office to complain about a peer, ask one simple question: Have you discussed this directly with them? If the answer is no, send them back to talk to their peer.

If they have tried and failed to resolve the issue, tell them to put it on the Issues List for the next Level 10 Meeting™. This forces the conflict into the open where the entire leadership team can solve it using the IDS® process.

Solving peer conflict in a structured environment teaches your team how to engage in healthy, unfiltered debate. It forces them to look at problems through the lens of the company rather than their personal departments.

Your role as a leader is to coach them on how to communicate, not to solve their problems for them. By forcing your team to run issues through the IDS® process, you build a cohesive, self-sufficient leadership team that can execute successfully without your daily intervention.