The Conflict Every Senior Leader Faces Sooner or Later
When Departmental Goals Clash: Making Better Decisions at the Top Table | The Strategic Leader Podcast
If you have spent any time at a senior leadership table, you will have been in this situation. A decision needs to be made that is right for the business but uncomfortable for your part of it. Your budget gets cut. A project you championed gets deprioritised. A direction is agreed that creates more work for your team, or less resource, or metrics that feel impossible to hit.
The question is not whether this happens. It does, and it will. The question is how you handle it when it does.
In this episode, Gemma and I work through something that comes up again and again in our coaching work and in the conversations we have been building across this series. It sits right at the heart of the three hats idea we introduced in episode one: the tension between wearing your functional hat (head of HR, head of finance, head of whatever your area is) and your enterprise hat (co-leader of the business, responsible for the whole, not just your patch).
When those two hats are pulling in different directions, which one wins? And how do you make that call without either losing your credibility in the room or abandoning the people who rely on you?
The tension is real and it is everywhere
The most obvious version of this is the eternal standoff between finance and everyone else. Finance holds the purse strings. Somebody has to. And so almost every investment proposal, hiring request or budget ask ends up sitting across a table from a finance leader who is, quite reasonably, there to apply challenge. That dynamic is uncomfortable but it is also correct. The tension is doing a job.
But the conflicts are not all that clean or that visible. I had one from fairly early in my career that I have been thinking about a lot while putting this episode together.
I was running the acquisition side of a marketing team. My job was to bring in as many new customers as possible. I had targets. I had tools that worked brilliantly for those targets. The problem was that some of those customers came in and left quickly, well within the period we were measuring. They ticked my boxes and fell through the floor at the same time.
Across the corridor, the retention team's targets were being quietly destroyed by everything I was doing. And I do not remember us ever sitting down and saying, hang on, what are we actually here for? We are not here to fill a leaky bucket. We are here to grow a customer base. These two things need to be working together.
The targets were never combined. The conversation was never had. And two teams within the same department spent years creating problems for each other, in good faith, while hitting their individual numbers.
I tell that story because I think it is more common than anyone admits. And at senior leadership level, where the stakes are higher and the ripple effects wider, the same dynamic plays out in boardrooms every day.
Four ways to think through the conflict
Gemma and I have been working with these tensions long enough to have developed some genuine views on what helps. Here are the four approaches we explore in the episode.
One: lift up to the helicopter view
When you are deep in a conflict between two sets of departmental goals, the most useful thing you can do is temporarily step out of both of them. Go up. Look at the overarching purpose of the organisation and ask: what does the business actually need here?
In the acquisition versus retention example, the answer is clear the moment you go up a level. The business does not exist to fill the top of the funnel. It exists to be profitable, and it is profitable when customers stick around. That shared purpose, once named, gives you a different frame for the argument entirely.
This sounds obvious. It is less obvious when you are in it, when your targets are on the line and your professional reputation feels attached to a particular outcome. Naming the organisational purpose explicitly, as a group, at the start of a difficult conversation, takes the heat down a notch and gives everyone something to orient around that is bigger than their individual position.
Two: look for the third way
Most conflicts in a senior team present as binary. It is either this or that. My budget or yours. The project or the cost savings. Acquisition or retention.
But a lot of the time, the either-or framing is a trap. Two things can both be true and in tension, and the answer can still be neither of them.
Gemma and I talk about this as the third way: a creative alternative that meets the underlying needs of both positions without simply splitting the difference. In my acquisition-retention example, one version of this would be changing the acquisition metric itself, adding a quality qualifier so that targets only count if the customer stays past a certain point. Suddenly the two teams are pulling in the same direction.
I had another example more recently where someone in my team was overloaded and I needed an extra person but had no budget. The obvious options were blow the budget or let the person burn out. Neither was acceptable. The third way turned out to be outsourcing a part of my own role, a piece of work I liked but could genuinely be done by a freelancer, which freed up enough budget to make it work. It took a while to get there and it felt slightly counterintuitive, but it was a genuinely better answer than either of the two options I had been stuck choosing between.
The question that unlocks the third way is usually some version of: what are both of these positions actually trying to achieve? And could we achieve both things through a route we have not yet considered?
Three: shift the perspective with an empty chair
This one sounds a bit unlikely but I have used it enough to say with some confidence that it works.
When a conflict in the room becomes entrenched, it is often because everyone is looking at the situation through their own lens. My goals versus your goals. My team versus your team. Bringing a third-party perspective into the room can break that open.
The empty chair technique is exactly what it sounds like. You put a physical chair at the table and name who is sitting in it. A customer. An employee. A shareholder. A board member. And then someone speaks from that position, not from their own functional one.
What would the customer want us to decide here? What would someone who works on the front line of this business say if they were in this conversation?
It forces a different kind of thinking. And it does something else too, which Gemma articulates well in the episode: it disconnects people from the emotional attachment they have built up around their own position. When you are speaking as the voice of the customer rather than the head of marketing, it is much harder to be defensive about your acquisition targets. You are no longer defending yourself. You are trying to represent someone else's interests. That shift alone can move a stuck conversation forward.
Four: map the trade-offs honestly
The fourth approach is about making the consequences of a decision visible, not just the immediate ones.
Every decision at senior level has an if-then. If we cut this budget, then this project does not happen. If we deprioritise this, then we are still dealing with the consequences in twelve months. Making those trade-offs explicit, laying them out plainly as a group, serves a few purposes.
It means the team makes the decision with full awareness of what it is actually choosing. It avoids the "kicking the can down the road" dynamic, where a short-term fix creates a larger problem that somehow surprises everyone later. And it means that when those downstream consequences do arrive, as they often will, no one can reasonably say they did not see it coming. The conversation is already on record.
The future-focus question I find most useful in these moments is: if we make this decision today, what will we be dealing with in twelve months as a result? It is a simple question and it has a way of surfacing things that the immediate pressure of the conversation has pushed out of sight.
The ego question
There is one more thing worth naming, and it is the one that does not always make it into the formal agenda.
At some point in most of these conflicts, the question stops being purely about strategy or resource or goals. It becomes about ego. About professional identity. About the story you are telling yourself regarding what you are here to defend and what it would mean to give ground.
I am not saying that is always what is happening. Sometimes there is a genuinely important principle at stake and it is right to hold the line. Gemma makes this point well: plenty of the people she coaches are if anything too quick to capitulate, too ready to fold their position before they have properly tested whether it deserves to be folded.
But it is worth asking the question honestly. Am I defending this because the business genuinely needs me to, or because I have become emotionally entrenched in a position that I would struggle to back away from without it feeling like a loss?
The mark of a senior leader is not that they always win the argument. It is that they know when to push and when to step back, and that they can tell the difference between the two.
Worth a listen if...
You have been in that meeting where two functional heads are going around in circles and nobody is landing anywhere useful. You are approaching a budget conversation where your department's needs and the business's direction feel fundamentally misaligned. Or you lead a senior team and want some practical tools for how to structure these conflicts more productively rather than just hoping they resolve themselves.
You can find The Strategic Leader wherever you listen to podcasts. And if there is a strategic dilemma you would like Gemma and me to dig into in a future episode, we would love to hear from you.
Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.