Four Types of Organizational Land
You’re in a leadership team meeting. The VP of Sales presents an aggressive growth plan that requires adding to the work of the customer success team. The Head of Customer Success pushes back — her team is already underwater and can’t absorb that growth without serious quality issues. The CFO points out there’s no budget for the proposed headcount. What started as a growth conversation becomes tense. People dig in. After the meeting, Sales pulls Finance aside to discuss “realistic options.” Customer Success vents to Product about “being set up to fail.” Everyone leaves frustrated, and the decision doesn’t get made. Three weeks later, you’re still stuck on the same issue.
Sound familiar?
While work styles and personalities play into it, this kind of friction isn’t primarily a people problem, though we often treat it that way. This is a “land problem”—and many leaders have never been taught to see it.
When we were promoted to organizational leadership, something fundamental shifted. Before, we had our domain. Clear territory. Clear authority. Success meant executing well in our area. But at the organizational level, the hardest and most important work doesn’t happen within our function—it happens in the spaces between them. The problem? We’re rarely taught how to navigate these spaces. We promote people because they’re exceptional functional leaders, then expect them to somehow intuitively know how to lead across the organization. Most of us try to apply our functional leadership playbook to organizational challenges. It doesn’t work.
Here’s the thing: if you’re experiencing friction with your peers over decisions that span multiple functions, that’s not a sign of failure. It’s a sign you’re doing organizational leadership. The question isn’t whether you’ll encounter this friction—you will. The question is whether you’ll navigate it productively or let it become destructive.
Most of the important work at the organizational level lives in what I call “shared land”—territory that genuinely belongs to multiple functions. This is where the complexity lives, where the best decisions get made, and where most leaders feel the most uncomfortable. If we don’t learn to navigate shared land effectively, we’ll either become territorial (creating silos) or deferential (avoiding necessary decisions). Neither works.
I’ve spent years as a COO and leadership consultant watching smart, capable teams struggle with the same pattern. They fight about strategy, budget, priorities, and headcount—but underneath, they’re really struggling with something more fundamental: they don’t know what kind of land they’re standing on or how to navigate it.
Here’s a framework to help you.
The Four Types of Organizational Land
Every decision, initiative, and challenge in an organization lives in one of four types of land. Understanding which type we’re in changes everything about how we collaborate with our peers across the company.
1) Functional Land
This is territory where one leader has clear authority and accountability. Decisions stay within one function. At the organizational level, this land is much smaller than we often think it is.
Functional land is where we still get to be the expert and decision-maker. It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. The danger is assuming more territory is functional land than actually is—or trying to turn shared land into functional land through force of will or position power. That’s how silos are born.
Examples:
Engineering’s technology stack decisions
Finance’s accounting processes
Sales compensation structure
What works here:
Clear ownership and decision rights
Efficiency and speed
Deep functional expertise drives decisions
Minimal need for cross-functional consensus
What doesn’t work:
Treating shared land like functional land (territorial behavior)
Making unilateral decisions that have cross-functional impact
Refusing to consult even when decisions affect others
2) Shared Land
Territory where multiple functions must collaborate because the work, decisions, or outcomes genuinely belong to more than one area.
Shared land is where organizational leadership actually happens. It’s messy. It requires us to advocate strongly for our perspective while remaining genuinely open to others’ views. It means living with the discomfort of not having final say while still being accountable for outcomes.
The quality of our peer relationships determines whether shared land becomes productive or toxic. When we trust each other, assume good intent, and focus on the organization’s success over our functional success, shared land creates better decisions than any one leader could make alone. When those relationships are weak, shared land becomes a battlefield.
Here’s what many leaders miss: shared land creates friction by design. We’re supposed to have different perspectives—that’s why companies need multiple functions involved. A great CMO and a great CTO will naturally see things differently. That friction, when navigated well, produces better outcomes. The goal isn’t to eliminate friction—it’s to make it productive rather than destructive.
Examples:
Go-to-market strategy (Marketing, Sales, Product)
Customer experience (Product, Customer Success, Engineering)
Pricing decisions (Product, Sales, Finance)
Product roadmap (Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success)
Annual planning (every function)
What works here:
Strong peer relationships built on trust
Clear process for how decisions get made
Focus on organizational outcomes over functional wins
Regular communication and coordination
What doesn’t work:
Avoiding the hard conversations
Trying to control what we should share
Making unilateral decisions
Building alliances to win rather than collaborating to solve
3) Conflicted Land
Shared land that has become contentious due to unclear ownership, competing priorities, poor relationships, or lack of process for resolution.
When conflicted land persists unresolved, it creates organizational debt —particularly relationship debt. Trust erodes. Leaders start avoiding each other or communicating through back channels. Alliance-building and factions form as leaders recruit others to their side rather than working through disagreements directly. What started as a strategic disagreement about how to approach a problem becomes personal. This relational damage compounds over time, making it harder to collaborate on anything, not just the original issue. Eventually, even simple decisions in shared land become battles because the underlying relationships are broken. Leadership team meetings are painful times where little gets accomplished.
Examples:
Customer data ownership that three different functions claim
Hiring decisions when every function needs headcount but budget is limited
Strategic priorities when leaders have fundamentally different views of what matters most
What creates conflicted land:
Moving too fast into shared land without building relationships first
Unclear decision-making processes (“who actually decides?”)
Making it personal instead of staying focused on organizational outcomes
Previous unresolved conflicts creating distrust
Competing incentives or success metrics across functions
A siloed leadership team
What it looks like:
Conversations become tense
Leaders avoid engaging or over-engage (too intense)
Back-channel conversations and alliance-building
Focus on being right rather than finding solutions
Relationships deteriorate
Here’s the important part: some conflict in shared land is not just normal—it’s necessary. When we’re navigating truly complex challenges that affect multiple parts of the organization, we should have different perspectives. The VP of Engineering should see things differently than the VP of Sales. That tension, when handled well, produces better outcomes than either could create alone.
The distinction between productive shared land and destructive conflicted land isn’t the presence of disagreement—it’s how we handle it. Productive shared land has disagreement within the context of strong relationships and clear process. Conflicted land has disagreement that becomes personal, positional, and stuck.
4) Unclaimed Land
Territory that falls between functions with no clear owner, often because it’s uncomfortable, ambiguous, or doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s job description.
Unclaimed land doesn’t just create inefficiency—it creates organizational debt in the form of missed opportunities and poor results. Revenue gets left on the table because no one coordinates the cross-functional work required. Customer experience degrades because the handoffs between functions aren’t owned. Strategic initiatives stall because everyone assumes someone else is driving them. Dysfunction persists. The cost isn’t always visible in the moment, but it compounds. What could have been captured with clear ownership becomes lost value that’s hard to recover.
Examples:
Cross-functional process breakdowns that everyone sees but no one fixes
Customer problems that fall between functions like Product and Support
Strategic opportunities no single function can execute
Organizational culture and effectiveness (everyone’s responsibility but often seen as HR)
Coordination and communication across functions
What creates unclaimed land:
“Not my job” mentality
Fear of stepping on others’ toes
Unclear accountability
Problem is visible but uncomfortable to address
Requires collaboration but no one wants to lead
Falls outside traditional functional boundaries
Navigating Organizational Land
The key to navigating organizational land isn’t avoiding friction or always knowing the right answer. It’s knowing what kind of land we’re standing on so we can adapt our approach accordingly. A decision-making approach that works brilliantly in functional land will destroy trust in shared land. What looks like collaboration in shared land can be abdication in functional land. Before we can navigate effectively, we need to diagnose accurately.
Before any important conversation, decision, or initiative, slow down. Breathe. The breathe again. Maybe go get a coffee. Slow your nervous system down so you can think clearly rather than on autopilot.
To understand what kind of land you’re in, ask these questions:
Who else’s function or priorities does this decision affect? (If multiple: shared land)
Is there tension or disagreement about how to proceed? (If yes with shared land: conflicted land)
Is anyone clearly accountable for this? (If no: unclaimed land)
Can I make this decision efficiently within my function without significant cross-functional impact? (If yes: functional land)
When in Functional Land:
Own it and make decisions efficiently
Consult when impact extends beyond your function
Don’t confuse speed with isolation
When in Shared Land:
Build the relationships first—they’re the foundation
Develop clear processes for how you’ll work together
Expect and normalize friction—it’s productive when handled well
Focus on organizational outcomes, not functional wins
When in Conflicted Land:
Stop and repair the relationship before solving the problem
Get clear on decision rights and process
Zoom out to shared organizational outcomes
Be willing to address the real issue (often it’s not what you’re arguing about)
When in Unclaimed Land:
Name it and make it visible
Understand why it’s unclaimed (hint: it’s often shared land)
Invite others to co-own it
Building Capacity to Navigate Shared Land
Most leadership development focuses on individual capability—how to give feedback, how to think strategically, how to develop our team. All of that matters. But the hardest work of the C-suite happens between leaders, not within them.
The question isn’t whether we’re a good functional leader. The question is whether we can navigate shared land: whether we can collaborate effectively when we don’t have full control, advocate for our perspective while remaining open to others’, and focus on organizational success even when it requires functional compromise.
The leaders and organizations that master this don’t have less friction—they have more productive friction. They’ve learned that the spaces between functions aren’t problems to solve or territory to claim. They’re where the real work of organizational leadership happens.
What Strong Partnerships Require
Navigating shared land effectively starts with the quality of our peer relationships. This isn’t about being friends or always agreeing—it’s about building relationships strong enough to withstand the friction that shared land naturally creates. Strong partnerships are built on regular communication that happens outside of formal meetings, where we stay connected to what each other is working on and thinking about. They require willingness to have hard conversations directly rather than avoiding conflict or talking around each other.
At the foundation is trust. Not blind trust, but the earned trust that comes from consistently believing we’re both working toward organizational success, not just protecting our own function. Strong partners stay curious about each other’s perspectives and constraints rather than assuming they understand or dismissing what they don’t agree with. They’ve learned to separate the problem from the relationship, so disagreeing about the best approach doesn’t damage their ability to work together. Most importantly, they’re committed to working through friction rather than avoiding it—because they understand that friction is where the best solutions emerge.
What Effective Organizations Build
Strong partnerships between leaders matter, but they’re not enough on their own. Organizations that navigate shared land well build the infrastructure to support it. They establish clear decision-making frameworks so everyone knows who has input, who decides, and what happens when leaders can’t reach agreement—ambiguity in decision rights is one of the fastest paths to conflicted land. They create explicit team agreements about how they’ll work together, what behaviors they expect from each other, and how they’ll hold each other accountable when those agreements get violated.
They protect regular time for cross-functional strategy and problem-solving, not just status updates and information sharing—shared land requires space for real dialogue, not just efficient meetings. They invest in leadership development that explicitly focuses on organizational versus functional thinking, helping leaders understand that success at this level looks fundamentally different than success in their previous roles. And perhaps most importantly, they’re willing to create real consequences for territorial behavior or collaboration failure, making it clear that protecting our function at the expense of organizational outcomes isn’t acceptable, no matter how strong our functional results are.
Want to learn more about how to help you leadership team be more effective? Let’s talk about how we can help.