The Challenge of Coordination

I’ve seen it play out dozens of times. A company has a clear strategy, talented people, and the resources to execute. And yet, somehow, things stall. Deadlines slip. Finger-pointing begins. The problem isn’t that anyone is instrinsically incompetent or malicious—it’s that the actors, believing they are acting rationally, end up only focusing on their parochial issues.

Coordination problems are insidious because they don’t announce themselves. No one wakes up and says, “Today I’m going to create organizational dysfunction.” Instead, the friction builds gradually—misaligned goals here, a turf battle there, a breakdown in communication somewhere else—until suddenly execution grinds to a halt and no one can quite explain why.

The benefits of getting coordination right are on display at some of the world’s most successful companies—from Amazon’s two-pizza teams to Spotify’s squad model to 3M’s innovation culture. But for most companies, seamless collaboration remains aspirational. Aligning multiple teams—each with different perspectives, incentives, and egos—is genuinely hard.

Let’s dig into what causes these problems and what to do about them.

The sources of friction

In my experience, coordination problems boil down to three root causes.

1. Conflicting goals or incentives

This is the most common culprit. In organizations that lack mature goal-setting processes, the sin is normally one of omission, not commission. Goals are underspecified, and it’s only when things come to a screeching halt that the lack of alignment becomes obvious. In larger organizations, size either limits visibility into what other teams are trying to accomplish or creates complexity that prevents efficient goal-setting in the first place.

Differences in incentives make things worse. Sales teams exist to close deals and grow revenue. Operations and product teams care about efficiency and user experience. These aren’t wrong priorities—they’re just different ones. When they collide, friction is inevitable.

2. Divergent views

Sometimes teams genuinely disagree on strategy or approach. How configurable should the product be? How much human interaction belongs in a client engagement? What’s the right balance between standardization and customization?

These aren’t coordination failures in the traditional sense—they’re legitimate strategic debates. But when they go unresolved, they metastasize into coordination problems. Teams stop collaborating because they can’t agree on where they’re going.

3. Human factors

Finally, there are the unavoidable egos and feelings of vulnerability. Whether it’s personal ambition or team parochialism, coordination exposes every human frailty in the organization. People protect their turf. They hoard information. They prioritize being right over getting to the right answer.

We all know what this looks like. The question is what to do about it.

Solutions that actually work

1. Surface and confront the issues

The first step is the hardest: acknowledging that a coordination problem exists. This requires open, honest conversation among teams—specifically identifying each team’s goals, incentives, and views, discussing the differences constructively, and finding alignment that reduces friction.

Most organizations skip this step. They paper over disagreements with vague commitments and hope the problem resolves itself. It won’t.

2. Define the “Greater Good”—and mean it

Every team should have its own goals. But there must also be a clearly articulated “Greater Good” that sits above them. Leaders have a duty to define what this looks like, whether in terms of company objectives or the coordination required to achieve them.

The trap here is appeasement. The Greater Good isn’t a compromise that leaves everyone equally unhappy. Teams must find the right decision for the company, even when that decision creates winners and losers among them.

3. Set better goals, build better plans

Goals should be set both top-down and bottom-up. The top-down view needs to identify where coordination problems are likely to occur. Leaders at all levels should then collaborate to figure out how to address them before they become crises.

This sounds obvious, yet most planning processes treat coordination as an afterthought—something to figure out once the “real” goals are set.

4. Establish decision-making parameters

When teams can’t agree, what happens? If you don’t have an answer to this question, you have a problem.

Effective coordination requires clear rules: a forum for decision-making, a regular cadence for addressing issues, and an escalation process that breaks deadlocks. Teams should strive to resolve conflicts themselves, escalating to executives only as a last resort. But that last resort needs to exist—and everyone needs to know how it works.

5. Leverage tools and technology

Sometimes lack of coordination is a sin of omission rather than commission. In a remote or hybrid environment especially, operating in one’s own circle naturally limits visibility into what other teams are doing.

Tools like Slack, Notion, Jira, even simple file sharing can help, but they are only tools. They neeed to be used intentionally to enhance transparency and reduce barriers. A Slack channel no one reads is worse than useless; it creates the illusion of coordination without the substance.

6. Reward good behavior, squash bad behavior

A company’s internal coordination is reflected in its culture. And culture starts at the top.

Leaders must reinforce good behavior and eliminate the bad, both in word and in deed. They should anticipate where coordination problems are likely to occur and actively promote the steps outlined above. Most importantly, leadership teams must themselves be aligned. If executives are fighting turf battles, the rest of the organization will follow suit.

The real challenge

The uncomfortable truth is that coordination problems are leadership problems. When teams can’t work together, it’s almost always because leaders haven’t done the hard work of aligning goals, establishing clear decision rights, and modeling the collaborative behavior they expect from others.

The solutions aren’t complicated. What’s hard is actually doing these things consistently, especially when it means confronting powerful people, making unpopular decisions, or admitting that your own leadership team isn’t as aligned as you thought.

The payoff is worth it, though. Companies that master coordination don’t just execute better, they build cultures where collaboration is the norm. Cultures where people, working together and acting in good faith, solve hard problems.