My leadership team members still view their roles solely as department managers rather than enterprise leaders responsible for the entire balance sheet and culture. How do we train them to prioritize the business as a whole above their own functional teams?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When leadership team members act strictly as functional advocates, your company operates as a collection of competing fiefdoms rather than a unified enterprise. Your head of sales fights for revenue volume regardless of operational margin, operations blames sales for bad promises, and finance acts as an internal police force. Everyone defends their territory, and no one owns the bottom line.

You must teach your executive team the First Team principle. Their primary team is not the department they manage; their primary team is the leadership team sitting around the executive table. Their loyalty belongs first to the company's enterprise vision, profit margins, and long-term health, and second to their direct reports.

Drive this mindset through shared quarterly Rocks and Scorecard design. If an executive hits their departmental numbers but the overall company fails its quarterly profit or delivery goals, the quarter is a failure for everyone. Stop rewarding isolated departmental success while the broader organization struggles. Tie leadership compensation and recognition directly to company-wide performance rather than localized metrics.

In your Level 10 Meeting™, challenge them whenever they speak purely from a functional standpoint. During IDS®, demand that your Head of Sales suggest solutions for operational bottlenecks, and force your Head of Operations to think through the revenue implications of delivery decisions. Require every leader to look at the business through the lens of the Vision/Traction Organizer® (V/TO®). When leaders embrace the First Team concept, cross-departmental politics dissolve, and the business gains the ability to execute quickly.