The worst meeting I facilitate is always the same meeting: two departments that need each other but currently hate each other, stuck in a room trying to “align.”

Marketing says Sales isn’t closing the leads. Sales says Marketing is sending garbage. Engineering says Product keeps moving the goalposts. Product says Engineering is too slow and won’t explain why.

Everyone has receipts. Everyone has grievances. And every single person in the room is about to tell the other side how to do their job, which means the meeting will end exactly where it started: nowhere.

The problem isn’t that these groups disagree. The problem is that they’re fighting the wrong fight. They’re arguing about competence when they should be negotiating about behavior.

Describe the Damage, Not the Fix

Here’s what I do instead. I split them up before the fight starts—separate rooms, separate 30 minutes. Each group gets the same assignment: write down five things the other team does that makes your life harder.

But there are two rules, and I’m not flexible about them.

Rule 1: You can only describe what happens to you. You cannot tell them what to do.

This is harder than it sounds. People want to say “You need to stop using that terrible CRM system.” I make them rewrite it: “When the lead data comes through without contact info, we lose four hours tracking people down, and 30% of them go cold.”

See the difference? One is an accusation about competence. The other is a description of consequences. The first one triggers a defense. The second one is just information.

Rule 2: Only current behavior. No historical grudges.

I don’t care that they missed the Q3 deadline last year. I don’t care about the project that died in 2023. If you can’t point to something happening now, it doesn’t go on the list.

This rule exists because people love to weaponize the past, and the past is inarguable. If you say “You’re always late,” the other side can spend 20 minutes litigating what “always” means. If you say “This week’s report arrived on Wednesday instead of Monday, and we missed the client deadline,” there’s nothing to argue about. It happened or it didn’t.

The Part Nobody Expects

Right before I bring them back together, I make them do one more thing. I tell them to spend five minutes writing down—privately, don’t share it yet—what they think the other group is writing about them.

This is where people get quiet.

Because suddenly they’re not just the victim anymore. They’re also the villain in someone else’s story, and they know it. The product manager who’s been preparing to eviscerate Engineering for being slow realizes that Engineering is probably writing about how Product changes requirements midstream. The salesperson, ready to destroy Marketing, realizes that Marketing is about to list every time Sales ignores the target customer profile.

It’s a minute of forced empathy that completely changes the temperature of the room.

What Actually Happens

I ran this last summer with a client—a healthcare tech company, Sales and Customer Success ready to kill each other. Sales said Success was losing accounts due to poor onboarding. Success said Sales was overpromising features that didn’t exist.

Both groups returned their lists. Sales went first. But because of Rule 1, they couldn’t say “You’re doing onboarding wrong.” They had to say: “When clients don’t get a check-in call in the first 48 hours, they email us, we don’t know who owns the relationship, and the client gets two different answers.”

Customer Success couldn’t say, “You guys lie to close deals.” They had to say: “When clients ask for features in week one that aren’t in the contract, we’re caught between telling them no and looking incompetent or saying yes and blowing our timelines.”

Nobody could argue with any of it. Because it wasn’t an attack—it was just a description of what was happening.

Once both sides read their lists, I sent them back to their corners. Their job now: figure out, on your own, how you’re going to stop causing the problems on the other team’s list. Not defend yourself. Not explain why you did it. Just fix it.

Sales came back with a plan to add a handoff protocol: a 15-minute call before the client goes to Success, notes in the CRM, and clear expectations set. Success came back with a commitment to first-contact speed and a weekly flag system for misaligned promises.

Four weeks later, the head of Sales told me their customer satisfaction scores had increased by 20 points. Not because anyone got better at their job—because they stopped accidentally sabotaging each other.

The Point

Inter-departmental conflict doesn’t usually happen because people are incompetent. It happens because people are optimizing for their own team without considering how it lands on others. The fight about “you’re doing it wrong” is unwinnable. The negotiation about “here’s how that hurts us” is solvable.

Stop letting teams critique each other’s methods. Make them describe the friction. You’ll be shocked how fast people fix problems once they’re not busy defending themselves.