Myra continued to stare, the (mis)behavior of two top executives, one in engineering and one in sales, rattled in her mind. “I know I need each system to run smoothly, efficiently, but they need to work together, or at least act like they are working together.”

“Look, you’re the CEO. From where you sit, what does their not-working together look like?” I asked.

“Here’s one,” she started. “We get a sale, a contract, which goes to engineering. Engineering takes the contract and starts to moan and groan about why they cannot engineer the elements of the contract. They complain there is missing information or the customer has a problem, but the engineered product isn’t going to solve the problem, or may even make matters worse. Then they complain that the sales people just aren’t smart enough be sales people. At that point, everything kind of goes off the rails.”

“So, there is a handoff meeting between sales and engineering that isn’t working?”

“What meeting?” Myra replied. “They both think meetings are a waste of time, so they just email contracts and drawings back and forth. Don’t get me wrong. I think our sales team does a really good job of getting interest and contracts from our customers. And, I think we have one of the best engineering teams around.”

“When a company starts off, they just have to get people to play their roles effectively,” I nodded. “But, once we have people effectively playing roles, and the company gets bigger, those individual roles have to work together. It’s a sandbox game that we learned when we were four or five years old. You have to get both teams in the same sandbox so they can learn to play together.”