Resolve an Execution Dispute

I was in my Virginia office when a vice president at the private equity firm that owned Netrix called from New York, relaying feedback that had come through the former CEO, who still sat on the board. Our management team had agreed on the plan and the board had approved it. Now some of the original Netrix executives were challenging decisions they had already agreed to in the meeting and taking their complaints to their friend on the board. The work they had committed to wasn't getting done. I told the vice president that the back channel had to stop. It was like squeezing a tube of toothpaste with both ends open. A little came out the front as execution. Most came out the back as complaints.

The back channel had been the architecture of the company for years. The former CEO had built a valuable business as a technology division inside FGMK, the accounting firm it was spun out of, and made himself the center of it. Every call around the operating line reinforced the old structure. Cutting the politics had to start at the top. I asked the vice president to send execution disputes back through the operating line, to the peers and leaders who had made the decision, and to make the boundary clear to the former CEO. That could not mean closing the board's door to a concern about my own conduct. The behavior did not stop overnight, but once I had named it, each recurrence became easier to address. Disagreement continued, and we brought it into the meetings where decisions were made.

Virtru, 2019. John Ackerly, the cofounder and CEO, brought me in at a fork: a successful email encryption business, a team building standalone document encryption for Word and Excel, and a possible larger move into government data protection. Each leader believed in the opportunity they were responsible for. Each leader made the case separately to John, and the more he listened to each argument alone, the more he became the only place where the three strategies came together. We took the executive team to the Four Seasons in Austin for three days. Each leader presented their view, challenged one another's assumptions, and worked through the tradeoffs together. The team voted. John confirmed it. The disagreement did not disappear. It became visible.

Wells Fargo is where the same question had a different consequence. In the Community Bank, the group risk officer reported to the division's leader, Carrie Tolstedt, with only a dotted line to corporate risk. After a September 2012 regional meeting, two managers raised sales pressure with the chief risk officer, Michael Loughlin. Later, the board report says, Tolstedt told the regional executive who ran the meeting not to speak with Loughlin anymore. Between 2011 and 2016 the bank terminated more than 5,300 employees for customer-facing sales ethics violations, almost all at the branch level, while, the board report found, senior Community Bank leaders framed the problem as individual misconduct. Repair included moving 4,100 risk employees into Corporate Risk in 2016 and ending retail product sales goals. The people who could challenge the sales model needed a route the implicated business could not block.

Map one reopened decision with the Backchannel and Bypass Record. It holds what happened, not motive; the group examines the route, not the person. Put the reopened request against the agreed priorities with a Tradeoff Ranking. Write down who owns, advises, approves, resolves, and records in the Decision Rights Record. Separately, confirm the Truth Route for misconduct, retaliation, safety, or a concern about the assigned leader. Close the room on HEAR.

If you lead the company, trace one reopened decision from the agreement to the private conversation that changed it, and name the forum it returns to. If the conversation ran through a board member or an owner, the board chair or the owners have to agree to the rule, because you cannot close that route alone. If you are in the middle and disagree with a decision, take an ordinary execution disagreement back to the people who made it; suspected misconduct, retaliation, or serious risk belongs on the protected route. If your own team is going around you, do not fight the channel alone: take the reopened decision, and the date it was agreed, to your boss, and agree on who closes the door. If people come to you privately, send execution disputes back to the room and misconduct to someone who can act. Privacy itself is not the problem. A person reporting misconduct may need it.

Conflict is not politics. Going around the decision is.