You know this sentence. It comes up at every briefing where something went wrong:
“It’s not our fault. It’s production.” / “It’s not us, sales promised the impossible again.” / “If maintenance had reacted in time…”
It sounds like ordinary blame-shifting. In fact it’s something far more expensive: the sound of a company paying a tax on its own silos – a tax nobody books, though everyone pays it.
This article is about how to see that cost, calculate it and stop pretending it’s “just a matter of getting along”.
Conflict between departments isn’t a problem of personalities
The first thing to turn around is the assumption that friction between departments comes from bad relationships or difficult people. It’s a convenient explanation, because it lets you send someone on a communication course and tick the box. But it’s false.
In most manufacturing and logistics companies, good, competent people produce conflict – because they sit in a system that forces them to. Production is rewarded for volume. Quality – for a low level of defects. Sales – for signed orders. Maintenance – for machine availability. Each department does exactly what it is held accountable for. And that’s exactly why they get in each other’s way.
Quality stops a batch that production needs to deliver the plan. Sales promises a deadline that production can’t meet. Planning draws up a schedule that logistics considers fiction. These aren’t arguments between people about ego. They are a clash of conflicting goals built into the structure.
As long as you see it as a personality problem, you’ll be treating the symptom. The cause is systemic.
Where does this cost really hide?
The war between departments doesn’t have its own line in the profit and loss account. That’s why it seems free. In reality it spills over into several places you already measure – you just don’t link them to their source:
Escalations upwards. A dispute that two departments can’t resolve horizontally travels to the plant director. Each such escalation isn’t just a delayed decision – it’s management time eaten up by ruling on “who’s to blame” instead of running the company.
Rework at the interfaces. Most errors don’t arise inside departments – they arise at their boundaries, at handover. A batch going back and forth between production and quality, an order bounced between sales and planning, documentation corrected over and over. The handoff is the most expensive moment in the whole process.
“Waiting for the other department” delays. Count how many orders are sitting with a note that someone else is blocking them. It’s pure cycle cost that doesn’t assign blame to anyone, so nobody counts it.
Duplicated work. When departments don’t trust each other, each keeps its own “true” records. Two people do the same thing because neither believes the other’s data. It’s a doubled cost dressed up as caution.
Turnover out of frustration. People don’t just leave bad bosses. They also leave places where every day they bang their heads against the wall of another department and nobody changes anything.
None of these items is called “the cost of misunderstandings”. But added together, that’s exactly what they are.
The myth that costs the most: “let’s send them on a communication course”
The most common reflex when departments are at each other’s throats is a communication workshop. Pleasant, well rated, without impact.
Because if two departments have conflicting KPIs, no active listening technique will fix it. They’ll come back from the training room and still be held accountable for things that are mutually exclusive. Communication is a symptom here, not the cause – and treating the symptom is exactly the kind of “activity without results” for which the board later cuts the entire development budget.
That doesn’t mean development doesn’t help. It does – but only when it hits the real source. And there are two sources. The first, hard one: the structure of goals and interfaces. The second, soft but equally real: the lack of a common language. Very often the conflict doesn’t arise because the other department is acting against you, but because they think and communicate differently – with a different style, at a different pace, with different priorities. And that can be learned: recognising that the person from the other department isn’t an enemy, but has a different working style. It’s the difference between “they’re impossible to deal with” and “I know how to talk to them”.
What really reduces the cost – four levers
1. A shared metric across departmental boundaries. Where the interface generates the most friction, introduce one indicator for which both departments are jointly responsible. If production and quality share the goal “delivered without defects”, they stop playing against each other, because they lose or win together.
2. Clear interfaces and ownership of handovers. Most friction arises where nobody knows whose responsibility it is now. Name the handoffs: who hands over what, to whom, in what condition. An unclear boundary is an escalation factory.
3. A shared language of styles (this is where diagnostics such as DISC work). When people from different departments understand that the other side isn’t malicious, just works differently, half of the conflict “by default” disappears. It isn’t a soft add-on – it is a concrete reduction in the number of clashes that arise from pure misunderstanding.
4. Horizontal resolution instead of escalation. Give departments a mechanism and a mandate to resolve disputes between themselves before they reach the board. Every dispute resolved at that level means management time saved and a faster decision.
The board’s language: it isn’t “atmosphere”, it’s operational risk
To defend a project to improve cooperation in front of the board, don’t talk about “a better atmosphere” or “integration”. That sounds like a cost with no return.
Speak in numbers the board already tracks: how many interdepartmental escalations land on the director’s desk each month, how much management time is eaten up by ruling on disputes, how many orders are stuck at interfaces, how much rework is created at handovers. Misunderstandings between departments aren’t a matter of relationships – they mean a longer cycle, errors, delays and board time. In other words, operational risk and a hard cost.
Present improving cooperation as what it really is: a shorter cycle, fewer errors at interfaces and recovered management time. Then it stops being a “soft HR topic” and becomes an efficiency project.
The most expensive conflict in the company
The most expensive conflict in your organisation isn’t between people. It’s between departments – or more precisely, between their conflicting goals and the lack of a common language. People are just the faces acting out this conflict, usually against their own will.
That’s why it can’t be solved with an appeal for “more cooperation” or a single workshop. It can be solved when you name its cost, find its source and address both – the structure of goals and the language departments use to understand each other.
And the first step is simpler than it seems: stop treating it as “just the way things are”, and start treating it as a cost item that can be calculated and reduced.