I have a rule about teams, and it sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, which is exactly why it needs saying out loud:
I don’t kick the ball into my own goal to prove I’m better than my goalie.
We’re not competing, my goalie and I. We can’t be. We have different roles — mine is scoring, theirs is preventing — and different goals, literally opposite stat lines. A striker gets measured on goals scored. A keeper gets measured on goals stopped. If you compared our numbers on a spreadsheet, we’d look like rivals. And at the end of the match there is exactly one score, one result, one team that either won or didn’t.
We win when we work together. That’s the whole rule. It’s obvious on a field.
Now watch your company forget it before lunch.
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Marketing optimized for leads. Sales optimized for pipeline. Operations optimized for delivery speed. Finance optimized for margin. Walk through those one at a time and every single decision inside each department is *reasonable* — smart people, doing their functions well, hitting the numbers they were given.
Nobody designed how the functions win together. So look at what the reasonable decisions do to each other.
Marketing celebrates record lead volume while sales drowns in unqualified junk — a ball kicked into their own goal, with a bonus attached to the kick. Sales overpromises to close the deal and scores directly on operations, who now have to deliver the impossible. Operations cuts a corner to hit throughput and scores on customer success. Finance tightens payment terms and scores on the next renewal conversation. Every department’s highlight reel is some other department’s blooper. Everyone hits their number. The company misses its.
That’s Coordination Friction™: the cost of everyone optimizing locally in a system that only produces results when people optimize together. It is the most expensive thing in your company that no one has ever been fired for, because every contributing act looks like good performance — is good performance, by the only scoreboard anyone was handed.
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And that’s the point to hold onto: this is not a character problem.
Your marketing lead is not a saboteur. Your sales team isn’t cynical. People play the game you score. Grade departments separately — separate targets, separate bonuses, separate victory conditions — and you have structurally instructed your team to compete with itself. The striker’s contract literally pays her to shoot at the keeper. Then leadership holds an offsite about silos, as if silos were a mood.
Silos aren’t a mood. They’re a scoreboard design.
Which means the fix isn’t cultural exhortation — no poster about One Team has ever moved a metric. The fix is re-scoring the game. Put metrics on the handoffs, not just the functions: lead-to-close rate belongs to marketing *and* sales, jointly, publicly. Onboarding satisfaction belongs to sales *and* delivery. Make the shared number the one that pays out, and make the company’s score visibly outrank every department’s. People play the game you score — so score the game you actually want played.
The day the striker’s bonus depends on the clean sheet is the day she starts sprinting back to defend. I’ve watched it happen in companies. It looks like a culture transformation. It’s arithmetic.
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Different roles. Different goals. One score.
Your team already knows how to play this way. Most of them learned it as kids, on a field, before anyone handed them a departmental KPI and taught them to forget it.