A familiar scene from corporate life: two departments are involved, neither knows how to negotiate with the other, and the thread opens with "Hi team..." before descending into polite daggers and a "thanks in advance" sign-off. Only one person can actually broker a deal between the two sides: the CEO. In a four-hundred-person company, that CEO already has eighty-six unread messages and a seven p.m. meeting. So an ordinary question between two departments gets escalated as if it were a missile launch - it needs sign-off, a resolution, and someone to personally call someone else. Otherwise nothing moves.
Plenty of proof, no results
Everyone is busy, everyone is tired, and everyone is stockpiling proof - translated plainly, evidence that their own slice got done. Here's the email. Here's the ticket. Here's the screenshot: "I told you so, I flagged this on Tuesday." A company can be remarkably good at generating proof of its own innocence while producing zero actual outcome.
People learn this skill over time: write so it can be produced later. Copy everyone who might be useful during the post-mortem. Get confirmation that the ball is now on someone else's side of the court. Then exhale - the paperwork says the job is done. The task itself is still sitting there untouched.
"You just can't work with them"
This phrase gets under my skin. My instinct is to ask: when did you last talk to them before things caught fire? Do you actually know what your "small urgent request" means on the other side of the screen - whose other work gets bumped to make room for it, whose client has to be told about the delay? Or is the other department just "them" to you?
"Them" from finance. "Them" from marketing. "Them" from IT, said with a little eye-roll. "Them" has no names, no context, and no reasonable explanations - just an apparent instinct to ruin your day. Inside your own team you know the details: Maria is closing the books today, two people on Sergey's team are out sick, and this particular question should go straight to Oleg because he'll handle it. Next door, none of that texture exists. There's just a collective character: "they're stalling again."
The longer departments live in this mode, the more energy goes into defending territory - cc the manager just in case, document the refusal, phrase everything so it can't be used against you later. Talented adults end up spending half a day drafting a message whose real job is surviving an internal inquiry. Meanwhile the client is still waiting.
Built a raft on Friday, fighting again on Monday
A team-building day can produce a lovely photo - everyone with an arm around someone's shoulder. On Monday the same people go back to writing "this isn't our scope." That's because on Friday they built a raft together, and on Monday they're back to incompatible schedules, unclear deadlines, and a task nobody explicitly owns.
A good shared day off is genuinely useful on its own terms - people meet each other, laugh, see a different side of a colleague. What's still missing is an answer to how they actually work together: who gets to promise a client a deadline, who confirms there's enough capacity, what counts as an accepted task, and where to go when two urgent requests both need the same specialist at the same time. Without those agreements, Monday eats through Friday's goodwill fast.
A colleague has nowhere else to go
Internal working relationships deserve the same care as relationships with important clients. You'd never write to a key account: "Guys, come on, read the previous email properly." A colleague gets exactly that tone, because a colleague has nowhere else to go - even though your ability to deliver on a client promise might depend entirely on that same colleague.
Think about how much effort goes into an external contact: clarifying expectations, picking a good time for a call, giving context, checking that both sides understood each other the same way. Inside the company, that same work sometimes gets replaced with "we're all adults here, people should just get it." They should, in theory - but everyone understands something different. For one person "urgent" means by lunch; for another it means sometime this week. "Take a look, please" means "give me your opinion" to one person and "redo this entirely" to another. Then both sides are genuinely surprised. I went deeper into how these mismatched expectations build up across whole departments in Cross-Functional Communication Gaps: Why Teams Stop Hearing Each Other.
Where I'd actually start
With the first stuck question - or even just one of them. I'd sit the people who hand work to each other in the same room, no forty-slide deck required - a video call with a facilitator works fine (that's me, in this particular scenario). I'd pick one concrete task: the one with three screens of beautiful correspondence attached and zero movement. Then walk through what actually happened:
- What exactly needed to be delivered?
- What got handed to the next person?
- What response came back?
- At what point did expectations diverge?
- What decision or resource is missing right now?
The trap to avoid here is sliding into another round of "you always do this." That pattern isn't getting fixed today. What can get fixed is this order, this document, this specific delay. From there, the group agrees on four things:
- What do you need from me so you can move forward? Vague requests like "just send it over properly" aren't specific enough - name the exact data, document, or decision required.
- What deadline can you realistically commit to given your current workload? If the deadline doesn't work, better to find out now, while the scope, priority, or client promise can still change.
- How will I know you've actually taken this on? A message in a group chat might get seen by ten people - someone specific needs to give an explicit yes.
- What happens if we're not going to make it? Who gets told, how far in advance, and who helps choose between competing priorities?
Better to settle this before Friday at 6:55 p.m. than to discover it during the fire.
Sometimes the decisions themselves have to change
The honest answers can be uncomfortable. It might turn out the work needs three people and there's only one. Or two managers are demanding opposite things. Or sales keeps promising timelines production has never actually confirmed. At that point the fix is changing the decisions, not practicing better manners.
A facilitator can help people hear each other, surface the real contradictions, and write the agreements down - but that doesn't make an extra staff member materialize in the room, and it doesn't resolve competing priorities on its own. That part is leadership's job. What the session does deliver is clarity about exactly which decision leadership needs to make, instead of the usual "can you just get them to agree already."
After the meeting, write down in two lines: who takes the next step, by when, what they need to do it, and when they'll flag a problem. Then come back to that agreement on the next similar task and check: was it simpler, were there fewer clarifying messages, did it skip the call to the CEO? If not, look for where it got stuck again. If your team keeps hitting the same wall, this is exactly the kind of stuck process we work through with real cases in corporate communication training.
And if the CEO turns the phone off?
Try counting how many times this week you personally had to mediate between departments and push a task across the line - how many hours that mediation actually cost. Are people coming to you for a decision only you can make, or for your authority, so the other department finally answers? Those are two different problems. In the second case, your role is slowly turning into round-the-clock delivery service for other people's requests. And what would happen to the work if you turned your phone off for two weeks?
FAQ
Where do I start if there are several stuck cross-department questions at once?
Pick the one that's costing the most money or reputation and work through it completely, from the original request to the exact point it stalled. Trying to fix everything in one meeting usually produces a long discussion about nothing in particular.
What if the CEO actually encourages people to route everything through them instead of talking directly?
That's a separate conversation with the CEO specifically: which questions do they genuinely want to see personally, and which are they willing to delegate once clear rules exist? Without that conversation, any agreement between departments keeps bumping into the habit of "better ask upstairs just in case."
Do I need an outside facilitator, or can the team resolve this internally?
Internal works fine as long as whoever runs the session has no personal stake in the outcome and both sides trust them. If the facilitator comes from one of the conflicting departments, people tend to assume a hidden agenda, and the session turns into another round of the same argument.
How do I tell when email has turned into evidence-gathering instead of problem-solving?
The simplest signal is managers getting cc'd "just in case" and phrases like "as previously stated" showing up repeatedly. Once that pattern recurs across several messages, it's time to move the conversation out of email and into a room.
How long does one of these stuck-task sessions usually take?
Forty minutes to ninety minutes for a single task, assuming some preparation: gather the correspondence beforehand and invite the people who actually made the decisions, not everyone loosely connected to the thread.
What if the agreements break down again a month later?
Go back to what was written down and check which part actually broke: the deadline, the confirmation format, or the scope. Most often the issue isn't bad faith - it's that the original agreement didn't account for one side's real workload.
