When Hitting the Target Moves the Problem
Sales is ahead of plan. Onboarding is meeting its turnaround target. Yet customers are waiting longer to get started.
Those statements can all be true.
Imagine a business where sales gets credit when the contract is signed, while onboarding measures turnaround only after it accepts a complete handoff. An incomplete deal can sit between those milestones. Neither of those two measures records the wait. The customer still experiences it.
The problem isn't speed. It's assuming that a better team measure proves a better customer result.
Before you approve the next productivity investment, examine that possibility. A tool that improves handoff quality may help. One that simply pushes incomplete work across the boundary faster may enlarge the backlog.
My planning rule is conditional: settle a material conflict before scaling the behavior it rewards. That's the useful version of coherence before optimization: agree on a customer promise, compatible team commitments and a way to resolve exceptions. It isn't a reason to delay every local improvement.
The targets aren't the enemy
Functional measures have a job. You need sales discipline, delivery standards and cost control. The trouble starts when a measure rewards a result that transfers delay, cost or unfinished work to someone else.
Asking people to collaborate doesn't remove a competing incentive. People may compensate with judgment and goodwill, but the design keeps asking them to choose.
Be careful with the diagnosis, though. Extra work for the next team isn't automatically waste. A necessary quality check may slow a handoff and still protect the customer. The question is whether the added work is justified by the customer result, the risk it addresses and the total cost.
Nor does a queue prove that incentives caused it. Insufficient capacity, missing skills, poor information or a change in the work arriving may explain the delay. Where work piles up is a place to investigate, not a verdict about why it stopped.
Your job is to make those distinctions before approving a remedy.
A focused coherence check
I'd start with one customer journey affected by an investment you're about to fund. Use the following as a working diagnostic, not a validated test of cause or a promise of savings.
1. Define the customer's finish line.
For the onboarding example, track time from contract signature to the first usable result, including any wait before the onboarding team accepts the work. Agree on what counts as usable.
Record current performance and set quality and cost boundaries alongside the time measure. Faster isn't better if customers need the work redone or the total cost becomes unacceptable.
2. Inspect actual handoffs, including ones that worked.
Bring together the people who send and receive the work. Trace recent smooth and delayed cases. Record when work arrived, what was missing, when it was accepted, what was returned and when the customer got the result.
Include time outside each team's reporting window. Separate customer-requested delays from internal ones. A process diagram won't tell you that a customer deliberately postponed the start.
3. Put the targets and their definitions beside the work.
For each function, record the target, when measurement starts and stops, and what reward or performance review attaches to it.
Then ask: could this number improve while the next team's work gets harder or the customer waits longer?
Check the cases before treating that possibility as the cause. A theoretical conflict is a hypothesis. A few bad cases don't establish that it explains the whole backlog.
If the issue is workload or missing information rather than a target conflict, don't redesign pay just to prove the theory.
4. Make the tradeoff explicit and change one operating rule.
In the hypothetical sales-to-onboarding case, you could test a rule that makes the sender responsible for completing missing information and the receiver responsible for flagging omissions within an agreed time. Keep the full customer wait visible rather than starting the measurement only after acceptance.
Have the affected leaders specify what each side must deliver, what happens when it doesn't and which unresolved tradeoffs require a leadership decision.
If incentives reward the behavior you're trying to change, revise them too. Keep goals within people's influence and individual responsibilities clear. A vague shared bonus can obscure contribution rather than improve cooperation.
5. Give someone authority to run the trial and review the result.
Assign an existing leader responsibility for the end-to-end result, authority over the agreed handoff rule and a clear escalation path for decisions outside that authority. A name on a slide isn't enough.
Review the trial after enough cases have completed to see the customer result. Read end-to-end time, rework and total handling cost alongside the local targets. Note changes in volume or case complexity so you don't credit the new rule for an easier week.
If the records show clean handoffs and a genuine capacity shortage, funding that capacity may be the right move. If both problems exist, test the handoff change and add capacity together. The point is not to expand a known defect, not to withhold useful investment until every dependency is perfect.
Resolve the dependency, not everyone's job
Keep the check scoped to the chosen customer outcome. Specify the information, quality and timing that must be dependable at the handoff. Leave genuinely independent work under local ownership, with room for professional judgment. Safety, ethics, legal obligations and essential quality remain constraints, not bargaining chips.
This doesn't automatically call for a reorganization. Cross-functional teams can improve coordination, but functional managers may be better positioned to develop specialist skills and maintain standards. An outcome owner doesn't have to become everyone's boss.
Keep room for challenge, too. Ask both sides what concerns remain and how either can trigger a review once the rule is in use. If people feel less able to challenge the decision afterward, investigate that. More objections aren't the goal; usable feedback is. Genuine agreement is fine.
And don't ask one team to make the agreed tradeoff, then punish it for missing an unchanged target. Change the target and the performance conversation together.
The next proposal shouldn't merely tell you how much faster a team will get. It should explain what the next team will receive, who resolves exceptions and how you'll tell whether the customer actually benefited.
Working through this with your own team?