Do You Have a Civil War Going On Inside Your Own Team?

I talk to business leaders, managers, and team members every week. Different businesses, different industries, different sizes. Same story.

Us against them. Them against us.

And the cost of that dynamic is something most owners never actually sit down and calculate. They feel it. They're exhausted by it. But they haven't put a number on it. By the time we're done here, you will.

It Comes Down to Two Things

As complicated as team conflict can feel from inside it, you can boil it down to two core problems. Leadership and communication. That's it. Simple to identify. Hard to fix. But that's where every version of this problem starts and that's where every solution has to begin.

I spent time working inside a company with five different departments. All five were at odds with each other in some combination at any given time. The sales team couldn't understand why operations was always complaining. Operations couldn't understand how sales could be so cavalier about what they were leaving behind. Sales felt like they kept everyone fed. Operations felt like they spent every day cleaning up sales' messes.

I could keep going. I haven't even mentioned the other three departments.

If any of that sounds familiar you're not alone. And you're not dealing with a people problem. You're dealing with a structure problem.

The First Thing That Has to Happen

Before any system gets fixed or any process gets improved, someone has to stand up and say it plainly: we are all on the same team. Period. There is no us against them.

That's not a harsh message. It's a necessary one. It's a stark reminder that different roles exist to accomplish the same objective and that objective is to serve your clients and patients. When that reminder is missing, departments optimize for themselves instead of for the outcome. And the whole operation pays for it.

That reminder has to come from the top. But it lands harder and sticks longer when it also comes from within the team. You almost certainly have team members who already feel this way. Find them. Elevate that voice. It's more powerful than anything that comes down from leadership alone.

The second piece is helping every team member understand their role in the sequence of serving your clientele. No role is more important than the one before it or after it. If your administrative team doesn't execute well on the front end, everyone downstream suffers. The clinical team, the billing team, the follow-up process — all of it is connected. When one link weakens the whole chain feels it.

Why This Never Fully Goes Away

This is something I coach on every week and will continue to coach on because it is genuinely ongoing. Teams change. Staff turns over. New people come in without context. Miscommunication fills the gaps that training hasn't covered. And if you have any ambition to scale or expand, every layer of growth introduces new friction points that have to be actively managed.

If you're not actively working on team alignment you're not staying even. You're going backwards.

What It's Actually Costing You

If the desire to fix the environment hasn't been enough motivation, let's talk about what this dysfunction is costing you in real terms.

The first cost is what I call the workaround economy. When systems aren't dialed in and people aren't executing their roles cleanly, your team members spend significant time and energy working around the gaps. Extra steps. Extra communication. Redundant effort just to get the same thing done that should have happened cleanly the first time. If you think you have ten people working at full capacity, the workaround economy means you're likely getting the output of seven. You're paying for ten and getting seven.

The second cost is misplaced attention. When your team is chasing fires they are not focused on the actual priority which is serving your patients and clients. If that is not at the top of every team member's list every single day there is a problem. And the workaround economy guarantees it won't be.

The third cost is growth you never capture. A team that is living in survival mode is not thinking about growing the operation. They are not identifying new opportunities, improving the patient experience, or finding ways to increase revenue. You are not just losing profit from inefficiency. You are losing income that was never generated in the first place. That second number is almost always larger than the first.

The fourth cost is the people themselves. Team members get tired. They get tired of the environment, tired of the negativity, tired of working twice as hard to produce the same result. So they leave. And they go somewhere else hoping it will be different. The cost of replacing them, recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity during the transition, compounds everything else on this list.

What Has to Change

If you're ready to end the civil war, there are two levers. Step up the leadership and fix the communication. Both have to happen together. One without the other doesn't hold.

Let's talk.

Written by Kevin Johnson, CEO and Founder of Leverage Consulting.