There’s a silent killer of momentum in most organizations. I call it corporate friendly fire.
We train people to master their individual tasks, to become the expert in their lane: Sales, Operations, Marketing, Finance. This builds an organization of highly skilled specialists, and it also creates a hidden structural weakness: the white space.
The white space is the gap between those experts. It’s the empty space on the org chart where ownership goes to die. It’s where a customer gets caught in the crossfire between a sales team that over-promised and an operations team that couldn’t deliver.
No one failed their specific task. Sales closed the deal. Ops fulfilled the contract as written. But the mission failed. The customer was lost. That’s corporate friendly fire.
How to spot white space fast
If you hear any of these phrases, you’ve found it:
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That’s not my department.
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We did our part.
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We’re waiting on them.
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It wasn’t in the requirements.
Those sentences sound harmless. They’re the smoke from a mission that’s already on fire.
The fix: assign ownership to the gap, not the boxes
A good team is defined by individual proficiency. A great team is defined by collective ownership of the white space.
That doesn’t happen by motivation. It happens by design:
1) Define the mission in one sentence
If the mission isn’t crisp, every team optimizes locally and calls it success.
2) Make one person accountable for the cross-functional outcome
Not the tasks. The outcome.
If you can’t name who owns the handoff, no one owns the handoff.
3) Debrief misses and near-misses as a team
Debriefing turns “I did my part” into “we own the outcome.”
If you want the deeper system behind this, it’s the core of my Ownership Operating System Leadership Training.
One Team, One Fight
When teams share the mission, they don’t defend boundaries. They swarm gaps.
That’s what a High-Performing Team Keynote Speaker is really installing: a standard where ownership extends into the white space.
Closing
If your organization is full of talented people but momentum dies in the handoffs, you don’t have a talent problem.
You’ve got an ownership design problem.
If you want to eliminate corporate friendly fire inside your team, start here:
- Clarify the mission
- Assign ownership to the gap
- Debrief the handoffs
If you want help installing it, explore my Ownership Culture Keynote Speaker work or reach out through my Fighter Pilot Keynote Speaker page.