Managing former peers and friends is genuinely hard, and pretending nothing has changed is the fastest way to make it harder. Lia walks through three moves: name the relationship shift out loud, co-create norms for feedback and hard conversations, and own your authority instead of downplaying it. This episode is especially useful for new managers who got promoted from within their own team.
This episode is part of the Team Culture, Dynamics & Tough Personalities series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“When you start at a place of alignment, you have such a better foundation to have a productive conversation.”
“…we have to recognize whenever you’re hearing they just, or us versus them, any of these little signals that you have a team where there’s conflicting motivations, you want to address it head on.”
“…we don’t really have conflicting motivations. We all are responsible for this revenue goal or hitting this number of customers or clients.”
Episode highlights
Why us versus them thinking quietly kills your team’s output
When creatives think account people only care about money, or engineers think product is just chasing features, those beliefs create factions. Nobody says it out loud, but people drag their feet, hold opinions longer than necessary, and resist being wrong because winning the debate feels more important than moving the work forward. Lia frames this clearly: conflicting motivations are not a people problem, they are an alignment problem, and they are fixable.
The first move: get clear on team values
Values are not a poster on the wall. They are the non-negotiable behaviors and qualities everyone on the team has genuinely signed up for. When those values are explicit and shared, they become a common language you can point to in any tense conversation. If one of your values is “customer experience above all else,” you can walk both the creative team and the account team back to that same anchor when they are at odds over timelines or budget. The value does not take sides. It just redirects.
The second move: make priorities impossible to misread
Values inform priorities, and priorities need to be specific enough that every role can see its own accountability in them. Lia recommends mapping priorities to SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely) so that the question is never “are we working toward the same thing” but instead “how do we each get there.” When a creative team and an account team are both staring at the same revenue goal, the conversation shifts from defending turf to proposing solutions. You are asking people to bring ideas that account for the other’s perspective, not just their own.
What that conversation actually looks like
Lia walks through a real scenario: a revenue goal, creatives going over timeline and budget, account folks pushing to tighten hours. Instead of picking sides, you bring both groups to the shared goal, name the tension without blame, and ask each group to propose levers they can pull. You also ask each side to articulate the other’s perspective out loud. Not to agree with it. Not to change their own view. Just to demonstrate they understand it exists. That perspective shift is one of the fastest ways to get walls to come down.
The third move: create cross-role collaboration on purpose
The most durable fix is structural. Pair an accountant and a creative on a problem. Put an engineer and a product person together to redesign a process they both touch. When people who think about problems differently have to build something together, they develop real empathy for each other’s constraints, and they start to see the business as one surface area instead of competing territories. The result is more well-rounded team members and a team that stops manufacturing conflict because they genuinely understand what the other side is dealing with.
The compounding cost of letting it fester
Lia is direct about what is at stake. When team members deep down believe someone is against them or does not get it, they slow down. They hold tighter to opinions they know they should let go of. They resist being right less than they resist letting the other person win. Opening up communication does not just feel better. It makes the work go faster. Conflict that looks interpersonal is often just a missing shared framework, and these three moves build that framework.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 224: Why certain team members bug you (and how to actually handle it). When a team member drives you up the wall but is technically doing their job, the problem is rarely performance. Lia breaks down three specific archetypes that trigger leaders, explains what each one is actually signaling, and gives you a concrete strategy for each. This episode is especially useful for owners and founders who keep dreading their own one-on-ones.
- Ep 218: How to get out of the friend zone with your team members. Being friendly with your team is great until it erodes accountability and makes hard conversations feel impossible. Lia walks through a three-step reset: name your leadership style out loud, set real boundaries, and commit to having the hard conversations consistently. This episode is especially useful for small-team owners and founders who hired people they already knew personally.
- Ep 144: How to motivate and align your team when everyone feels like they are sprinting a marathon. Motivating a team under tight deadlines comes down to shared context, early visibility, and a culture where people feel seen beyond their project output. Alison Curtis and Janessa Mason, leaders at creative agency Skona, share how they align client services and creative teams through transparent communication, collaborative timeline-setting, and deliberate relationship-building at every level. This episode is especially useful for founders, agency leaders, and anyone managing across departments that can feel like they have competing agendas.
- Ep 141: How to manage former friends without making things weird. Managing former peers and friends is genuinely hard, and pretending nothing has changed is the fastest way to make it harder. Lia walks through three moves: name the relationship shift out loud, co-create norms for feedback and hard conversations, and own your authority instead of downplaying it. This episode is especially useful for new managers who got promoted from within their own team.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
We have different ways to approach how to do it, but at its core, at its foundation, we’re completely aligned. And when you start the conversation from there, not at a place of us versus them, they’re not listening, they don’t understand me, defenses pointing fingers. When you start at a place of alignment, you have such a better foundation to have a productive conversation. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant.
Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.
From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Well, the jury is in, it is official. The Unstoppable Team is a number one bestseller on Amazon, top new release. This is such an exciting moment because it means the book can get out to help more and more people. And if you haven’t picked up your copy yet, what are you waiting for?
Pause this, go to Amazon, grab the Unstoppable Team, because this is the playbook that you need to bring more ease into managing, to have simple strategies and tools to save time, money, and most of all, stress, which results to your team satisfaction improving, folks sticking around longer, that’s always a good thing, and really being able to scale your business. So if you haven’t grabbed it today, head to Amazon.com, pick up Unstoppable Team, and I cannot wait to hear what you think.
With that said, let’s dive right in. Today is a fun one. You know, this is diving into a topic that has been a predominant theme in my career of managing team operations, of working in the design operations space predominantly in big tech, and this is about rationalizing those conflicting motivations on teams, and a lot of us have them. We have creative versus account, we have product versus engineering, and we create these us versus them sentiments that actually start to really chip away at the quality of the work, the experience of your employees, and again, this us versus them, it creates factions that makes it hard for folks to work together.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to grow your business because everybody’s not really aligned on that shared goal. Now, when I worked in the design space, there was beliefs that creatives are just kind of working on an island, they don’t care about timelines, they don’t care about budgets, and then creatives were saying about account people, they just care about making money, they don’t care what the product quality looks like, they don’t care what the design is, and those two beliefs, again, it creates conflict, and it’s hard to rationalize, it’s hard to get a team working cohesively when that’s the way.
When I worked in engineering teams, it was, you know, engineers believed product people just want to shove a bunch of features into the product and get more stuff in there, and product people felt like engineering just wanted to kind of spin their wheels on stuff, or they didn’t want to kind of do more, they just wanted to prove the current thing. Whatever these beliefs are, these will slow your team down, and so we have to recognize whenever you’re hearing they just, or us versus them, any of these little signals that you have a team where there’s conflicting motivations, you want to address it head on, and so I wanted to talk about, well, what are three ways that we can do that?
How do we get everybody aligned? Because at the end of the day, we are working in the same company, we do theoretically have all the same goals, so we have to bring people back around to really acknowledging that. Now, the first thing we need, and this is critical for every team, every business, no matter what, is to have your team values. Now, I want to do a deeper dive on values in a future episode, so I’m not going to talk around how to create values, but what I want to really drive home is you must, must have team or company values that everybody understands, everybody has agreed they have signed up for, and everybody’s really operating against.
Now, team values are these deeply held beliefs, these are the non-negotiables, these are the behaviors that we want to embody, or the qualities we want to embody. They can be current, they can be aspirational, but we’re all really clear on what those are, and when you have team values that everybody’s aware of, everyone’s bought into, now we have a common language that we’re all operating against. If one of our values is customer experience above all else, let’s say, then that’s some language we can bring together product and engineering or creatives and accounts or whoever this sort of us versus thems are looking at and say, well, how do we address this challenge mapping it to our value of customer service above all else?
And that’s the kind of thing that can help frame conversations, right, because you have something to point back to. If we say our value is delivering, you know, the utmost cutting-edge technology world class, right, something like that, well, then when we’re rationalizing product quality versus more features, things like that, that’s going to help us govern that decision. So values help us figure out how to prioritize, how to make decisions, how we’re operating, and it can create that common language for you to reconcile some of those what seems like conflicting motivations.
Because at the end of the day, we’re not at odds. We share these values. We have the same goals in mind. Now this feeds right into the second thing that’s critical is having very clear overarching priorities for the team and the company. And this is how we see our values and our mission translate into actual measurable goals. And I talk about this a lot in the Unstoppable team that we need to have clear priorities. We can’t have a million priorities and we can’t have two vague priorities.
Having very clear priorities, and I love to map them to SMART goals, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely, that’s the SMART goals framework. So we say, hey, this is what we’re trying to do. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s when we’ve done it. Here’s how we know if we’ve done it. When we have priorities like that, we take everybody on the team and we say, hey, are we all clear on how we’re going to deliver on hitting these priorities?
And that’s another way to build alignment because everyone sees that, hey, this is what we’ve all signed up for. Again, we don’t really have conflicting motivations. We all are responsible for this revenue goal or hitting this number of customers or clients or opening the second location of our store or facility, whatever, or creating this new line of business. We are all signed up for it. We’re on the hook. Then we can get into brass tacks about how to get there.
And there’s some nuances there and some levers we can pull. But there’s not a question of like, does some people feel like they’re working towards this big priority and other people don’t. We have to build alignment that, yes, we are all responsible for delivering on these priorities. We all have our marching orders on how we’re going to do that. And I talk about how to do that in the Unstoppable team. And then once we’ve established that, there really is not a conflict.
Do you want some hands-on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show? Like a team expert who has worked within tech giants like Apple and Google, as well as small businesses on hand to help you delegate and get out of the weeds, handle tough conversations with team members, plan your hiring strategy, and get your teams to help bring in more revenue? Then it’s time to sign up for my Team Whisperer Consulting Sprint.
For 90 days, you have me in your back pocket to help you navigate any and every issue happening on your team. DM me the word sprint on Instagram or email me at hello at leahgarvin.com and let’s build your Unstoppable team. If you get to a situation where you have, let’s say you have a revenue goal of doubling your revenue next year, and you have a team that has creative and account folks, and those folks are at odds a little bit.
Creative folks want to keep tweaking and fine-tuning, and they’re going over timelines a little bit. They’re going over budget and projects. And account folks are saying, we got to get tighter, we got to get tighter, we got to get tighter with our hours. And the two feel like they’re at odds. Well, going back to the team and saying, hey, here’s our revenue goals. Here is where we’re landing on the spend on each project. Creative, we’ve gone a little bit over.
Now, what are some of the things that we can do in the future to kind of optimize that time? And you ask them to proactively share ideas. It’s not just we’re taking sides with the account here because we want to say, hey, we don’t want to lose quality here because some of the reasons we have repeat clients and folks coming back to us and folks recommending us to others is because of the high, high quality of the creative.
And so account folks, what are some levers we can pull on the streamlining of operations side on figuring out packages or retainers, whatever that looks like on the client services so that we make sure to give creative the space to deliver the highest quality results. But we’re operating under that shared understanding that we have this revenue goal and that we have these shared values that we’ve already talked about. And then we have a conversation where we’ve already checked several boxes that, yeah, we are aligned.
We have different ways to approach how to do it, but at its core, at its foundation, we’re completely aligned. And when you start the conversation from there, not at a place of us versus them. They’re not listening. They don’t understand me. Defense is pointing fingers. When you start at a place of alignment, you have such a better foundation to have a productive conversation. And you’re asking the different departments or the different folks with different focuses to propose ideas that account for the other’s perspectives.
Another thing that can be really, really helpful here is to ask folks to play the role of the other person’s perspective. Just to understand like, hey, are they even able to kind of bring in some empathy here? Are they able to do a perspective shift? For example, asking an engineer, hey, share what you think is going on for the product team’s perspective. Where’s their head at? And asking them to do that with engineering. Asking folks to try on that hat for a minute.
This is a really helpful thing to do to get people to kind of take the walls down and realize there’s perspectives that aren’t my same ones that I can acknowledge. I don’t have to agree. I don’t have to change mine. But I respect it. And I can acknowledge that it’s a part of the conversation. Now, the third thing that I recommend so much to break down these walls, help with these conflicting motivations, and get people in line, get back to collaborating, seeing that they really are on the same page, is to find opportunities where folks can collaborate across organizational boundaries.
Across role type. Pairing up an accountant and a creative person to solve a problem. Maybe it’s saying, hey, we want to optimize how we’re doing our creative reviews. Let’s put the two of you together to figure out what’s the best way to do that. Figuring out projects where you get people that think about problems in different ways and have a very different purview into the business, to work together to cross-pollinate, to share ideas, to build more empathy about each other’s experience.
And the more you do this, the more you’re making well-rounded employees that understand the full surface area of your business, and you break down these walls that we really believe no one sees as things are a way, because it’s not true. And when you start to see the way that other teams think about problems in your company and in your team, you start to see, hey, we are way more aligned than we thought. And you get out of this us versus them thinking.
Those are the three things that I would suggest to try if you are finding this us versus them, this account versus creative, the engineering versus product, whatever this posing forces feels like. Really get clear on those team values. Reiterate them. Talk about what they mean. Talk about how they translate to the work. These values inform the priorities. Okay, being very, very clear on your priorities and how every single role maps to that. And making sure everyone sees, yes, I am bought in.
I see that I am accountable to delivering on these priorities. And then third, finding opportunities for folks to work together across roles, across organizational boundaries, so that you create a more well-rounded set of team members that really understand all facets of the business and have empathy for what each perspectives that each person embodies in their different roles. So give those three things a try. And I cannot wait to see how that brings more ease into your team, fosters more collaboration, reduces conflict overall, and starts to help you deliver on those results faster because you’re not getting stuck in the debating and the disagreeing that comes when people don’t see each other’s perspectives.
That’s something that really slows things down. And I think it’s underestimated that when we deep down believe someone’s against what I’m doing or they don’t get it, we might drag our feet. We might go a little bit slower. We might hold on tighter to an opinion or perspective than we need to, even if we kind of know we don’t need to keep it anymore, but we don’t want the other person to be right. The more we open up communication, the more seamless interactions become and the faster work goes.
All right, so if you like this episode, share it with a friend. Definitely if you are seeing those opposing forces, pass it along because this one I think is going to help folks just find a little bit more ease in the way they’re working. All right, see you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I stop my team from having an us versus them mentality?
There are three concrete things to try. First, get clear on your team values so everyone has a shared language to make decisions from. Second, set clear overarching priorities tied to measurable goals so every person can see they are accountable to the same outcomes. Third, create opportunities for people across different roles to collaborate on real problems together. When people work side by side with someone whose job looks different from theirs, they build empathy and realize they are far more aligned than they assumed.
Why do different departments on my team always seem to be in conflict?
The conflict usually comes from each group believing the other has opposing motivations. Creatives think account people only care about money. Engineers think product people just want to pile on features. These beliefs chip away at collaboration and slow the business down. The root cause is almost never a true difference in goals. It is a missing shared framework, clear values, clear priorities, that helps everyone see they are actually working toward the same thing.
How do team values help reduce conflict between departments?
Team values give everyone a common language to fall back on when perspectives clash. If one of your values is customer experience above all else, you can bring a creative team and an account team into the same conversation and ask how each side would address the challenge through that lens. It reframes the discussion away from who is right and toward what the team already agreed to stand for. Values help govern decisions and priorities so conflict does not have to be personal.
How do I get employees to understand each other's perspective at work?
One approach that works well is asking someone to literally describe the other person's point of view out loud. For example, ask an engineer to explain where the product team's head is at, then ask the product team to do the same for engineering. They do not have to agree with the other perspective, just acknowledge it. This small exercise helps people take their walls down and recognize that other valid viewpoints exist, which is often enough to shift the tone of a conversation from defensive to collaborative.
How do I get two opposing groups on my team to start working together?
Pair people from different roles on a shared project or problem, something neither side can solve alone. When an account person and a creative person have to work together to figure out how to improve a process, they stop seeing each other as opponents and start seeing how the other thinks. The more cross-role collaboration you build into regular work, the more well-rounded your team becomes and the faster the us versus them feeling fades, because it is hard to distrust someone you have actually built something with.