Four heads of function, one table, and the one I needed most didn’t report to me.
Why fixing one half keeps rebuilding the other.
The person I most needed at that table didn’t report to me.
This was the boardshorts business. Design sat in one room. Production in another. The merchants had a little office of their own. Marketing was in a different building entirely.
Everyone was with their own team. That was how it had always worked, and nobody had ever asked whether it still should.
How the season reached me
Before, a season plan arrived on my desk in pieces.
The merchant had objectives. To fund them, they needed marketing to sign off the investment. Development needed to know what was being built before they could commit. Sourcing needed the costings.
Every choice landed on somebody else. Design shaped marketing. Marketing shaped the merchant’s plan. The merchant’s calls hit sourcing and development through costing.
But each of those choices was made in a different room. So each of them brought me their part, and I joined it up.
Nobody was doing anything wrong. That was simply how it was set up. I was the only place the pieces met.
Where the idea came from
It wasn’t totally mine.
My boss and I had meetings we called the shit test. Brainstorming where nothing got judged. In one of them he used Pixar as an example. One team around one project.
I wanted that. The head of product, the head of marketing, the head of development and the head of design around one table. Together. All the time.
The seat I couldn’t fill by asking
Three of them worked for me. Sourcing and development had only just come under me.
Marketing didn’t. And marketing was where the investment got signed off, which made it the seat that mattered most and the only one I couldn’t fill by asking.
So I went to his boss and said we should all be sitting together. He agreed. Our brand lead agreed. And that was that.
It’s worth saying plainly, because it wasn’t persuasion and it wasn’t influence. I found the person who could say yes, and I asked them.
They all hated it
Including the three who worked for me.
“No, we need to be with our teams.”
Which was fair. They did. I was asking them to leave the people who reported to them and sit with three people who didn’t.
I didn’t have a clever answer. I said please just roll with it.
There was a lot of trial and error. But two weeks in, they stopped emailing each other. Not because anyone told them to. They were in the same room, so they talked instead.
That wasn’t the thing, though.
The day it changed
One day the four of them came in together.
This is what we want to do this season. Everything covered. Already agreed between them.
One team, fighting for what it wanted to drive into the business.
They didn’t need me to join it up any more, because they’d done it at the table.
The division grew. And my job changed. Less time joining pieces together. More time getting the best out of the people doing the work.
What actually moved
I didn’t delegate anything.
Nobody was handed new decisions. Nobody got new authority on paper. What moved was where the pieces met.
The plan had been reaching me in parts because the way the business was set up made me the only place they could come together. Change where they come together, and the parts stop needing you.
A lot of what reaches a senior leader arrives that way. Not because nobody else can decide, but because the people who need to agree never sit in the same place until it lands on your desk.
And the hardest seat at the table is usually the one you don’t control. Most advice says influence your way there. Sometimes the quicker route is finding the person who already has the authority and asking them.
The resistance at the start was impressive.
What came after was fucking amazing.
And all I’d actually changed was where four people sat.
Andrew