Coordination - Where Execution Breaks Between Teams

One of the hardest parts of execution isn’t getting people to work.

It’s getting teams to work together.

Most teams aren’t unwilling to collaborate. More often, they haven’t been given the opportunity — or the incentive — to do so.

Over time, organizations naturally drift into functional silos. Teams focus on optimizing their own work, often without visibility into how it impacts others upstream or downstream.

The result is predictable.

Work moves forward within each team, but not always in a way that fits together.

I’ve seen this play out in very practical ways.

In one organization, two teams were working against each other without realizing it. One team entered transactions as efficiently as possible. Another team spent their time reversing those same transactions and re-entering them differently.

Both teams were doing their jobs well.

The system wasn’t.

This went on for years until a broader initiative forced the organization to step back and examine the full process.

That’s the Coordination layer of the Execution Stack.

Coordination

Teams understand how their work connects — and align their efforts accordingly.

When coordination breaks down, organizations see the same symptoms over and over:

• duplicated effort

• rework

• late surprises

• growing frustration between teams

Everyone is busy.

But the work doesn’t come together cleanly.

Strong coordination doesn’t happen by accident. It requires visibility across teams, shared understanding of how work connects, and leadership that reinforces alignment across functions.

When coordination holds, execution feels smoother than expected.

When it doesn’t, even well-defined initiatives struggle to move forward.