Your Team Shouldn't Have to Guess (or Argue)
I have friends who are married, genuinely good together, happy, healthy, and always double-booked.
One of them will casually mention a weekend trip three days before it happens, and the other will look up like, "Huh, what weekend trip? I told somebody we were free."
Nobody is necessarily doing anything wrong. They just don't have a shared way of communicating the information that affects both of them. And because the issue feels small, they keep treating each individual incident like an accident instead of recognizing the pattern.
Organizations do this all the time.
The scale is different, but the pattern is the same.
Let's say a mid-sized hospital system has one medical director overseeing four department leads: cardiology, surgery, emergency medicine, and pediatrics.
On paper, they are peers reporting into the same structure.
In practice, two of them have disliked each other since a budget dispute years ago, and nobody ever built a real process for what happens when their departments actually need each other.
So, a child comes into the ER with symptoms that need a pediatric consult, and because of what the team is seeing, cardiology needs to weigh in too. And it's the cardio and ER doctors with the beef. But no clear protocol exists for who takes the lead, whether pediatrics or the ER calls cardiology, who has final say if there is disagreement, or how quickly a joint decision is supposed to happen.
So old friction fills the gap where the process should be.
One physician calls someone directly because they know they will answer faster. Someone else gets irritated because they were supposed to be looped in first. A nurse is waiting for direction. The family is waiting for an answer. And precious minutes are being spent figuring out whose call it is instead of caring for the kid.
Or, a ten-person music school has a lead vocal instructor and a piano instructor who occasionally need the same practice room. There is no shared calendar and no clear rule for whose session takes priority. It happens three or four times a month.
Somebody moves rooms. Somebody gets annoyed. Somebody says, “I thought you knew I had it.”
Nothing dramatic happens. And that is part of the problem.
Because organizations rarely stop functioning the first time communication breaks down. They compensate.
People make assumptions. They text the person they know will answer. They create side conversations. They start working around another department. They stop asking certain people altogether. Somebody becomes the unofficial keeper of information they were never supposed to own.
Eventually the workaround becomes the way the organization works.
Forbes reported this week that workplace conflict costs businesses an estimated $2 billion every day and that 76% of employees experience conflict regularly.
I believe it.
But conflict does not always look like somebody yelling in a conference room.
Sometimes it sounds like:
“We thought your team was handling that."
“Nobody told us.”
“That’s not how we’ve ever done it.”
“I assumed she knew.”
“We talked about it in the meeting.”
“I sent an email.”
And my personal favorite: “Everybody knows that.”
Everybody, almost certainly, does not know that. And if they do not know, there is a good chance it's because you have not told them.
Or, more often, because you have not developed the right process to make it easy for people to work together...and then told them what that process is.
A lot of what organizations call people problems are actually communication infrastructure problems.
Every recurring conflict is a missing document.
Not a missing conversation. A missing document.
The married friends need a shared calendar, not a heart-to-heart about honesty.
The hospital needs a written escalation protocol for department overlap cases, not a mediated conversation about an old budget dispute.
The music school needs a visible room-booking system with an agreed priority rule, not another reminder to “communicate better.”
If the same friction keeps resurfacing, the real gap usually is not feelings.
It is that nothing was ever written down, so every instance gets renegotiated from scratch.
And when the answer is unclear, history, personality, and resentment rush in to provide one.
Build the handoff protocol, not just the org chart.
An org chart tells you who reports to whom. But it says almost nothing about what happens the moment two people’s roles overlap.
Which is exactly when things tend to fall apart.
If pediatrics and cardiology both need to be involved, what happens first?
Who initiates contact? What information has to be included? Who owns the next decision? What happens if the two teams disagree? How quickly does the issue escalate?
That is the thing that needs to be designed.
Not a values statement about collaboration.
Not “we encourage cross-functional communication.”
A usable answer.
A protocol.
Because the best communication systems reduce the amount of interpretation people have to do when they are already busy, irritated, rushed, or unsure.
Make the standard visible, not just agreed upon.
A rule everybody nodded at in one meeting six months ago is not infrastructure.
It is a memory.
And memories are unreliable exactly when tempers are short, and people are moving quickly.
The fix has to live somewhere people can actually find it in the moment they need it.
Posted.
Pinned.
Built into the workflow.
Included in onboarding.
Attached to the form.
Written into the process.
Not buried in a Slack thread from March.
That is what I am usually looking for when I work with organizations.
Not just, what should we say?
But:
What keeps breaking down?
Where are people filling gaps with assumptions?
What information is living in somebody’s head instead of in the organization?
Where do roles overlap without a clear handoff?
What has leadership agreed on that the rest of the organization cannot actually see?
What process exists in theory but not in practice?
And what communication tool, message, workflow, document, or system would make the right thing easier to do?
That might mean an internal communications structure.
A decision tree.
A handoff protocol.
Leadership messaging.
A stakeholder map.
An escalation path.
A communications playbook.
A clearer intake process.
A set of talking points people can actually use.
Or something else entirely.
The deliverable depends on where the breakdown is.
Building the communication infrastructure that helps the organization function the way it says it wants to. Don't just talk about it, be about it, and then set it up and talk about it. That's my favorite work.
If you leave something unaddressed long enough, people stop seeing it as a problem and start calling it how we work. And by then, it is usually costing you more than you realize.
If your organization keeps running into the same confusion, conflict, or communication breakdown in different forms, I help figure out what is underneath it and build the systems, language, and tools that make it easier to work differently.
Explore strategy and communications support at DominiqueBrienne.com
