Summary.    It’s not uncommon for multiple stakeholders within companies to have differing visions or even competing agendas. In this article, the authors offer strategies for how to get everyone on the same page — and what to do if the confusion persists. Sometimes a...

When multiple stakeholders in an organization have competing visions and different success criteria for completing a project, it’s almost inevitable that conflict will ensue. For instance, a company’s sales team — eager to close deals and fulfill the demand they’ve created — might push to get a new product to market fast, while the engineering team wants to slow the process down to address bugs and work through the technical debt from the last product launch.

Whose agenda gets prioritized? Unfortunately, it’s usually the loudest voice in the room or the person with the highest-ranking title. But “winning” doesn’t equal victory; rather, this type of win comes at a cost and will often end up driving your best players from the organization. No one wants to stay in a perennially unharmonious environment or a workplace where crucial business functions consistently get short shrift.

Based on our experience consulting for high-growth companies (Karen) and keynoting for global corporations (Dorie), here’s what you can do to ensure that everyone has the same success criteria — and what to do if the confusion persists.

Identify the cause of confusion.

In order to identify a workable scenario for all stakeholders, the affected leader must first understand what’s causing the confusion. There are a few especially common reasons why success metrics end up all over the place. First, it’s possible various department heads actually aren’t clear on the company’s goals — in which case, senior leadership needs to understand when and how the misalignment occurred. (It’s important to look in the mirror here, as the problem sometimes emanates from conflict in the C-suite, such as turf battles between the CTO and CFO. If they’re sending disparate messages, no one downstream will have a grasp on what to prioritize.)

A second common scenario is that one department head (or several) doesn’t have a clear view of the company’s available resources and how their work fits into the overall picture. And third, sometimes the issue is more basic, such as poor communication, as when one executive deluges their subordinates with emails, leading to information overload and an inability to prioritize. Once you’ve identified the source of the confusion, you can solve for the particular problem at hand.

Get everyone on the same page.

Sometimes a simple one-on-one is all that’s needed to clear confusion and identify a workable set of success criteria for everyone. The person navigating the conflict — often a director of product who feels caught in the middle — should first go to each of the stakeholders individually to try to sort out the issue; a fast and low-key solution is sometimes possible when sides aren’t “dug in.”

If that doesn’t work, the person managing the conflict can take the next step and gather all the interested stakeholders in the same room (virtually or in person) to discuss the situation. Depending on how deep the conflict goes (and the convener will have a sense of it from the initial one-on-ones), they may decide to bring in someone with influence to help adjudicate the dispute and work through the issues. This could be someone in senior leadership, such as a COO or CFO; a high-ranking colleague; or perhaps even a neutral third party (such as an organization consultant) who can gain buy-in from the opposing parties.

The person conducting the meeting should start by identifying the commonality among all stakeholders — even if that person has to go back to the company vision statement. The goal is to find something everyone can agree on, and then build to a shared agreement about what “success” looks like for the issue being discussed. The process can be high-stress, and it’s useful for the person conducting the meeting to allow space between the actual discussion and “decision time” — such as a coffee break in which everyone can relax — as a way to release pent-up pressure.

Finally, when one of us (Karen) conducts such meetings, she has the stakeholders write summaries about what happened in the meeting, what everyone agreed on, and what that means for them and their department. We do this exercise until all stakeholders are saying the same thing — because misalignment is more common and more costly than many leaders realize.

Know when to let go.

Despite our best efforts, it’s not always possible to get everyone on the same page, and sometimes each stakeholder continues along with their own personal agenda. If the issue is minor, the employees caught in the middle can try to make the best of a murky situation and move on. Whether it’s a startup founder with a different vision for the organization from investors or an established organization with a culture that rewards political backstabbing, the result is the same: Your best talent is likely to leave, because no one wants to stay in a situation amid constant conflict and infighting that sabotages their chance of success.

It’s not uncommon for multiple stakeholders within companies to have differing visions — and even competing agendas. But if we systematically focus on getting clear about the causes of conflict and working to solve them collectively, we can often help our organizations thrive, rather than devolving into a collection of self-interested fiefdoms.