Two execs at war?

Hi Everyone,

When two of your executives stop cooperating, it often looks like a personality clash. But most of the time, the cause is structural: two roles that overlap, a decision nobody clearly owns, or two targets that reward opposite outcomes.

Both people are responding sensibly to the setup they were given, and the setup made them opponents. That's useful to know, because a structure can be fixed much faster than a personality.

Today, we're breaking down the three structural causes to check before you treat it as a people problem.

The structure behind most executive fights

1. Their roles overlap

As a company grows, new executive roles get created before anyone decides exactly where one ends and the other begins. That's normal when a business is growing fast.

But some pairs cover the same territory. A chief revenue officer and a chief marketing officer both own parts of the pipeline. A COO and a CFO both own parts of planning. When two roles overlap like that, the two people in them will disagree about hiring, budgets, and priorities across the whole shared area.

Check it by listing the disputes between the two. If they spread across many topics rather than one or two recurring decisions, the problem is the roles themselves. Change them by moving a team, a mandate, or a metric from one of them to the other, and put the new split in writing.

2. Nobody owns the decision

Sometimes the roles are clear, but a single decision sits between them. Pricing is the classic case. Your head of product and your head of sales can both have good reasons to think they own it, and since both of them are right about their role, neither will back down.

Writing the ownership down helps less than you'd expect. Even companies with RACI charts run into the same problems, according to a Harvard Business Review study of more than 100 companies. The roles get assigned before anyone agrees on what the decision is for, one senior leader writes the chart alone and never updates it, and when things get tense, people follow the hierarchy instead of the chart.

What works is much simpler. For every decision the two keep fighting over, name one approver. One person decides, the other one is consulted, and both of them know this in advance. If two owners have to agree, they'll block each other on anything they both care about.

3. Their targets work against each other

Two executives can also end up with targets that work against each other. When your sales lead is paid on new deals, and your customer success lead is paid on retention, they'll fight over every discount, because a discount helps one number and hurts the other. Both of them are protecting the number you told them matters most.

Look at what each of the two is measured on this quarter. If hitting one target makes the other target harder to hit, the disagreement will continue until you change one of the numbers, no matter how many conversations you have.

Isn't some conflict healthy?

When executives disagree openly, they usually do sort it out, and some of that disagreement is worth keeping. Kathleen Eisenhardt at Stanford studied top teams making high-stakes decisions and found that the teams who argued hard over the issues made better decisions, while the teams with little open disagreement made worse ones.

But a structural conflict doesn't stay open like that. When the same two people lose to each other on the same decision again and again, they eventually give up on arguing in front of you, and by the time you can see the conflict, it has usually been running for a while.

A quick check

In your one-on-ones, listen for phrases like still waiting on her team, blocked until he signs off, or asked twice and heard nothing. Go through your notes from last month and mark which two names keep coming up. Then take the decisions stuck between those two and run them through the causes above.

Go deeper

👉 Harvard Business Review: What Companies Get Wrong About Decision Rights — read this before you draw up a RACI chart; the four mistakes cover most of the ways these charts fail in practice.

👉 Harvard Business Review: How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight — Eisenhardt's classic on keeping executive disagreement useful; the six tactics still hold nearly thirty years later.

👉 McKinsey: Decision-making: avoiding turf wars — use this when you assign the single approver; it walks through who recommends, who approves, and who is only consulted.

Coming up tomorrow

In tomorrow's issue, you'll get a guide for the exit conversation with a departing executive to turn it into the most honest feedback session you'll get all year.

Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow.