Your Departments Are at War, and You Are Funding Both Sides

I have a theory. Every company, no matter how big or small, has one meeting every week that absolutely did not need to happen. And somehow, I have been in all of them.

You know the one. Sales is on one side of the table looking victorious. Operations are on the other side looking like they have not slept. Finance is in the corner doing math that nobody asked for. And everyone is talking about a problem that, if you trace it back far enough, started because someone sent an email with the words “just wanted to loop you in.”

This is not a communication problem. This is not a people problem. This is a you-built-a-machine-and-forgot-to-connect-the-parts problem. And I say this with love, because I have been that founder too.

Sales closed a deal. Everyone else opened a trauma response.

Picture this. Your Sales team closes a big order on a Friday afternoon. They are thrilled. There is a celebratory email. Maybe even a GIF. Operations gets the same email, reads the delivery timeline, and immediately starts typing a reply that begins with “Hi, just to flag.” Finance pulls up the margin. Marketing wonders if this client was even in their target segment.

By Monday morning, the deal that made everyone happy on Friday is now a four-department group chat that nobody wants to be in.

Sound familiar? Good. Because this is not bad luck. This is what happens when you build strong teams and forget to build the roads between them. Everyone is driving fast. Nobody is driving in the same direction.

The real problem is almost embarrassingly simple.

I spent years thinking inter-department conflict was a culture problem. So I did what founders do. Team lunches. Off-sites. A workshop with a consultant who used the word “synergy” without a hint of irony and charged me accordingly.

None of it stuck. Because the problem was never the people. The problem was the gaps.

Every organisation has edges. Places where one team’s job ends and the next one begins. And in most companies, nobody has ever clearly decided who owns what lives in between. That gap? That is where your customer complaints come from. That is where your missed deadlines live. That is where good people start blaming each other for things that are genuinely nobody’s fault.

I once watched two of my senior managers argue for forty minutes about whose responsibility a delayed shipment was. Turns out it was delayed because of a system error that neither of their teams controlled. They were fighting over a problem that belonged to neither of them. Nobody had thought to check. We were all just very committed to the argument.

When departments fight, founders usually try to fix the relationship. I have learned the hard way that fixing relationships without fixing the structure is like mopping the floor with the tap still running.

You became the most expensive problem-solver in the building. Accidentally.

Here is the trap most founders fall into, myself included. Every time your teams clash, you step in. You hear both sides, you make a call, you move on. You feel useful. Decisive. Like a leader.

What you have actually done is taught your entire organisation that the fastest way to resolve anything is to escalate it to you. So they do. Every time. For everything. Including things that two reasonably intelligent adults could absolutely have sorted out over a ten minute conversation if they had just known who was supposed to own the decision.

I once got pulled into a conversation about which team was responsible for updating a product description on the website. I am the CEO. I was deciding who owns a product description. This is what happens when you become the default answer to every question.

The fix is boring. It works anyway.

Sit with each of your teams and ask one simple question: where does your job end? Then look at what falls in the middle. Assign it. Write it down. Tell everyone. That is it.

Not glamorous. No keynote moment. No consultant required. But I promise you, most of the wars happening inside your business right now have a surprisingly administrative root cause. Someone never wrote down who was responsible for the thing everyone is arguing about.

Your departments are not fighting because they dislike each other. They are fighting because the system you built left them no other option. Fix the system, and watch how quickly the fighting stops.

And please, for everyone’s sake, stop being cc’d on emails about product descriptions.

Regards, 
Rupesh