“I don’t think you realize the chaos this is creating!” Her voice was clearly sharper than she wanted.
The COO snapped backed: “And I don’t think you’re grasping how slow we’ve become. We are drowning in inconsistency.”
An hour into the meeting, the discussion had very much escalated. What had happened?
Well, the exec team was debating whether to centralize key decisions or grant teams more autonomy. Kind of classic clash territory. And this meeting was no different, a constant back and forth.
The CEO kept coming back to coherence. Fewer exceptions. Less duplication. One company, one way of doing things.
The COO kept coming back to ownership. Fast reactions close to customers. Managers who can act without waiting for permission.
At some point, the language turned into labels: Chaos! Bureaucracy!
And then, the COO closed their notebook. “We are miles apart on this. If we centralize like this, we will kill initiative.”
The CEO later told me she felt like they blocked necessary progress.
We looked at the situation again, trying to understand what each side actually wanted.
The CEO wanted faster decisions and less duplication.
The COO? Faster decisions and less duplication.
Both wanted clear standards for teams.
So why did it turn into a battlefield?
Because at some point, both of them stopped getting it right. And wanted to be right. It’s a frequent pattern I see in my coaching.
Once the goal is to be right, every counterargument feels like a personal threat. A concession feels like a loss of status.
But once you see this, how can you go back to getting it right?
Stop defending your story and shift to something like this:
“What would have to be true for their concern to be valid?”
“What are they protecting that I might be underestimating?”
Now the objective is not to validate your take. You try to understand the constraints well enough to design a better way forward.
In messy executive reality, a path is often available long before everyone agrees on why. In fact, everyone can have different explanations for why it’s the right choice. And it still works for everyone.
The best part is this: once you’re moving, yesterday’s opponent can become tomorrow’s loudest advocate.
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
