Walk into your operations department and ask what they think of your salespeople. Then walk over to sales and ask the reverse. If your business has more than a dozen people, you probably already know roughly what you’d hear, and I doubt either answer would make you proud. I watched this play out in real time at a company of about 40 employees, during one of the first all-employee meetings I sat in on there. The vice president was reading the new vision statement, mission statement, and company commitments out loud to everyone. When she reached the line saying the company was committed to being a sales-driven organization, the operations manager raised his hand. He didn’t soften it. In his department, he said, they hated the salespeople. Sales was always coming in with urgent demands and rearranging his schedule, and his people saw the sales team as selfish, self-centered, and the source of nothing but problems. So how could the mission statement say that?
Everybody in that room already knew the feeling. The surprise was hearing it said out loud with the whole sales team sitting a few rows away. And that company wasn’t unusual. When Stanford’s Behnam Tabrizi studied 95 cross-functional teams inside 25 leading corporations, he found that nearly 75% of them were dysfunctional, failing at least three of five basic tests: meeting the budget, staying on schedule, meeting specifications, meeting customer expectations, and staying aligned with the company’s goals. As Inc. reported on the study (opens in new tab), the cause had little to do with talent and a great deal to do with unclear governance, a lack of accountability, and goals nobody had made specific. Tabrizi’s own summary is blunt: “silos tend to perpetuate themselves.” Left alone, an attitude like the operations manager’s gets handed down to every new hire in his department.
The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’
— 1 Corinthians 12:21, ESV
What the vice president did next is the reason I still tell this story. She didn’t scold him, and she didn’t change the subject. She pointed at the salespeople, all sitting together and staring back at him, and walked him through how the business actually works. Those people are here to make sales. When they make a commitment to a customer, they bring it to operations to find out whether the work can be done and delivered in the time they promised, and if it can’t, they’re the ones who have to call the customer back. Even when operations delivers, if the admin team doesn’t get the invoice out and the customer doesn’t pay, nobody gets paid. It takes sales, admin, operations, and every other department working together, she told him, and then she closed with a line I’ve never forgotten: “You better learn to love the salespeople because if they don’t make a sale, you don’t have a job.”
Paul made nearly the same argument to a divided church almost two thousand years ago. The believers in Corinth had split into camps, some saying “I follow Paul” and others “I follow Apollos” (1 Corinthians 1:12, ESV), and by chapter 12 the gifts God had given them were being used to rank one another. The Theology of Work Project (opens in new tab) points out that some members were treating one particular gift as proof they were more spiritual than everyone else. Paul answered with the picture of a body: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21, ESV). God arranged the body that way, he wrote, “that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26, ESV).
Paul was writing to a church, not a company, and I’m careful not to stretch his letter into a business manual. The principle underneath it still applies anywhere people depend on each other to get the work done. That operations manager was the eye telling the hand it had no need of it. In most businesses I walk into, the salespeople are saying the same thing back, just in the break room instead of a meeting. Notice where Paul puts the weight, too. The vice president argued from paychecks, and her math was right. Scripture argues from something deeper than the P&L: care. Your departments belong to each other in a slow quarter just as much as in a record one.
of cross-functional teams studied were dysfunctional, failing at least three of five tests including budget, schedule, and alignment with company goals. Behnam Tabrizi, Harvard Business Review →
So what would Jesus do with two departments that can’t stand each other? We don’t have to guess, because his own disciples handed him the same problem. At the Last Supper, Luke records that “a dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest” (Luke 22:24, ESV). Jesus didn’t pick a winner. He turned the question upside down: “Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves” (Luke 22:26, ESV). An owner has to model that posture before asking it of anyone else, because culture defaults to the personality of whoever is running the business. If you side with sales every time there’s a conflict, or roll your eyes about operations in front of your sales manager, your departments already know which one you think is the greatest, and they’ll behave accordingly.
Tabrizi’s research points to the practical side of the same truth. In his study, cross-functional projects with strong governance, meaning leaders from each department overseeing the work together, succeeded 76% of the time. Projects with only moderate support from the top succeeded 19% of the time. You can’t pray silos away while leaving the structure untouched, because they grow wherever nobody at the top has defined how the pieces fit together.
Here’s where I’d start.
Put the interdependence in writing. A mission statement that calls the company sales-driven, customer-driven, or quality-driven needs a sentence explaining what that asks of every department, not just the one it names. That’s the difference between company commitments employees will remember and a slogan one department resents.
Read it to everyone, in the same room, at the same time. The operations manager’s objection surfaced only because the company held a meeting where the documents were read to the whole room. Most owners never create that moment, so the resentment never gets said and never gets answered. When I’m asked what small change has the biggest impact on a culture, I have three simple answers: communication, communication, and communication. Hold a monthly meeting that every employee is required to attend, and hold it every single month.
Make the handoff a shared expectation. Most sales-versus-operations friction lives in the handoff: what gets promised, by when, and who confirms it can be delivered. Write that down as a standard both departments agreed to, so the next urgent request follows a process instead of arriving as an ambush.
Treat the complaint as information. The worst response to an employee like that operations manager is to shut him down. He said what half his department was thinking, and the answer he got changed how the whole room understood the business. If you’d rather deal with friction before it hardens, When Avoiding Conflict Stops Being Kind looks at what Matthew 18 asks of a leader in that moment.
This work sits at the center of GH Group’s Inside-Out Method™, because a business where one department keeps telling another it has no need of it will never run the way the owner hopes, however talented each department is on its own. Faith doesn’t guarantee the outcome, and nothing in 1 Corinthians promises that unity pays. What Paul describes is harder than that and better: a body where, when one part suffers, the rest of it notices.
