When Two Good Teams Don’t Work Well Together

Does this sound familiar?

Two strong teams. Talented people. Clear roles. Good leaders. Individually, they perform. But when they come together, something feels off.

• Decisions slow down.

• Conversations get defensive.

• Priorities clash.

• Problems bounce between teams instead of getting solved.

Everyone is working hard. But the organisation isn’t moving at the speed and with the confidence it should.

If that sounds familiar, the issue isn’t capability. It’s misalignment. And it is costing you time, trust and performance.

Why alignment between two teams matters

Most leaders focus on building high performing teams within a single unit. That’s important, but it’s not the whole story.

Organisations grow through joined up leadership. If the teams at the top are not aligned, they unintentionally create drag.

You see it in:

• Competing priorities

• Slower and more painful decisions

• Frustration at handover points

• Duplicated effort

• A confused message to the rest of the business

  
  

Two brilliant teams that don’t work well together create more friction than one dysfunctional team.

Momentum is created or destroyed at the points where teams intersect.

What is really going on?

When two teams struggle to work well together, it is rarely down to personality differences. The cause is almost always structural or cultural.

The biggest causes I see are:

• Different interpretations of the strategy

• Cultural friction between teams

• Unclear ownership of big priorities

• High trust within the teams, but low trust between them

• Conflicting success measures

• Not enough time spent thinking together

Everyone believes they are aligned. They’re just aligned to different things.

How to align two teams

Here are the practical steps you can take now to bring two teams together.

1. Create shared clarity

Both teams should be able to answer the same three questions in the same way:

• What are we trying to achieve together

• What matters most in the next 90 days

• How will we behave with each other when things get difficult

  
  

2. Map where the pressure is

Create a pressure map to show where each team is spending its time. It quickly reveals duplication, gaps and the friction points that slow everything down.

3. Remove structural friction

Make the mechanics clean. Clarify decision rights, ownership, roles and handover points. When structure is clear, relationships improve quickly.

4. Think and learn together regularly

Not updates. Not presentations. Thinking time. A bi monthly or quarterly joint session focused on learning, insight, building trust, and looking ahead will pay for itself many times over. Treat the two teams as one extended leadership system.

What leaders often get wrong

They assume goodwill equals alignment.

They hope the teams will work it out.

They fix symptoms rather than causes.

They blame complexity instead of addressing a lack of clarity.

They run separate team days rather than shared ones.

What it looks like when it works

“When alignment clicks, you get:

• Faster decisions

• Cleaner ownership

• More focus and less noise

• More confidence and less defensiveness

• One consistent message to the organisation

• A leadership system that feels joined up and future focused

  
  

Two good teams become one aligned force and that is where momentum comes from.

If this sounds like your world

If you’ve got two strong teams who aren’t working well together, it won’t sort itself out.

Alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design.

I help senior leaders align their teams around strategy, culture and customer experience so they can move fast, make better decisions and deliver results.

If you’d like to explore how I can help your teams work brilliantly together, you can email at richard@twentyoneleadership.com or call me directly on 07932725113.