When Leaders Optimize for Their Function Instead of the Company
Functional excellence without collective accountability is a recipe for silos.
On paper, we were crushing it. Sales were ahead of quota. Engineering was shipping features on time. Marketing was generating record leads. Operations were hitting efficiency targets.
So why wasn't the company growing?
The answer took me months to see. Each of my leaders was optimizing for their own function—and in doing so, they were sub-optimizing the whole.
Sales were closing deals we couldn't deliver profitably. Engineering was shipping features that marketing couldn't explain, and sales couldn't sell. Marketing was generating leads that weren't qualified for what we actually offered. Operations were so focused on efficiency that they'd cut the slack out of the system, leaving it unable to handle variability.
Everyone was succeeding individually. We were failing collectively.
I call this the Individual Hero Problem—the pattern where strong functional leaders optimize for their own metrics rather than company-level outcomes. It's one of the most frustrating dysfunctions I see when coaching founder-CEOs, because you have talented people working hard and still getting poor results.
What the Individual Hero Problem Looks Like
The pattern shows up as silos. Each function operates as its own kingdom with its own priorities. Cross-functional work is painful. Hand-offs between teams are where things break down.
You'll notice that leaders talk more about "my team" and "my results" than about "our company" and "our results." In leadership meetings, each person presents their functional update, but there's little discussion of how the pieces fit together.
When something goes wrong that spans functions, watch how leaders respond. Do they rally together to solve it? Or do they protect their territory, explain why it wasn't their fault, and wait for someone else to own the fix?
There's often tension between functions that never quite gets resolved. Sales blames marketing for bad leads. Marketing blames the product for the lack of differentiation. Product blames engineering for slow delivery. Engineering blames everyone for constantly changing priorities. The finger-pointing is a symptom of local optimization without shared accountability.
The founder frequently ends up as the integrator by default—the only one looking at the whole picture and trying to make the pieces fit together. That's not sustainable, and it's not how high-performing leadership teams operate.
The Root Causes
The first reason is that functional metrics are easy to measure. It's simple to track whether sales hit quota or engineering shipped on time. It's harder to measure whether the leadership team collectively created enterprise value. People optimize for what they're measured on.
The second reason is that functional excellence is what got these leaders promoted. Your head of sales became head of sales because they were great at selling. Their identity is tied to their function. Asking them to optimize for something bigger feels like asking them to be less good at what they do best.
The third reason is that leadership teams often lack shared goals. There are company targets and functional targets, but there's nothing in between—no clear metrics that the leadership team collectively owns. Without shared targets, leaders default to individual ones.
Finally, local optimization feels like the right approach. Each leader is working hard, hitting their numbers, serving their team. It's only at the system level that the dysfunction becomes visible. From inside any one function, things look fine.
The Hidden Costs
The most obvious cost is sub-optimal business outcomes. The system produces less than the sum of its parts. You have A-player leaders producing B-player company results.
The second cost is cross-functional friction. When leaders optimize locally, their functions inevitably come into conflict. The tension between sales and operations, between product and engineering, between marketing and everyone—it's exhausting and corrosive.
There's a significant opportunity cost. The energy spent managing cross-functional conflict could be spent on customers, products, and growth. Internal friction is pure waste.
The cultural cost is perhaps most damaging. When leaders model functional loyalty over company loyalty, their teams follow suit. The organization fractures into tribes. Information gets hoarded. Collaboration becomes political. The culture becomes internally competitive when it should be externally focused.
How High-Performing Teams Handle This
The fundamental shift is from individual accountability to collective accountability. High-performing leadership teams define shared metrics they all own—not instead of functional metrics, but in addition to them.
The question to ask is: what is the team trying to achieve that no single function can accomplish alone? Revenue growth, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency—these are system-level outcomes that require integration across functions.
Once you have shared metrics, leadership meetings change. Instead of each function presenting its update, the team discusses collective performance and where integration is breaking down. The conversation becomes "how do we hit our shared targets" rather than "here's how my function is doing."
A powerful marker of a high-performing team is what I call the willingness to make your job harder. An individual leader should be willing to accept more difficulty for their function if it makes the overall system work better. The head of sales should be willing to slow down deal flow if it helps operations maintain quality. The head of engineering should be willing to reprioritize if it helps sales close critical deals.
This doesn't mean neglecting functional excellence. It means balancing functional performance with system performance—and when they conflict, system performance wins.
Do You Have This Problem?
The first test: Does your leadership team have shared metrics they all own? Not company metrics that the CEO tracks—metrics that the leadership team collectively discusses, troubleshoots, and feels accountable for. If not, you're relying on local optimization to produce global results.
The second test: when a cross-functional problem arises, what happens? Do leaders collaborate to solve it, or do they define why it's not their problem? The response reveals whether there's collective accountability or just individual responsibility.
Ask yourself: would any of your leaders voluntarily make their function's job harder if it served the company? Have you ever seen it happen? If not, functional loyalty is trumping company loyalty.
Where to Start
Begin by defining two or three metrics that the entire leadership team owns together. These should be outcomes that require cross-functional coordination—things like customer satisfaction, revenue growth, or operational throughput. Make these team-level metrics a standing agenda item in leadership meetings.
Shift the structure of leadership meetings. Reduce time spent on individual functional updates. Increase time spent on collective performance, cross-functional issues, and system-level optimization. The conversation should be "how are we doing together" before "how is each function doing separately."
Create mechanisms for leaders to understand each other's challenges. Have leaders spend time in each other's functions. Create forums where trade-offs between functions get discussed openly rather than resolved through back-channel negotiations.
Model the behavior yourself. When making decisions, explicitly discuss the system-level impact. Ask "what's best for the company" before "what's best for any single function." Make it clear that you evaluate leaders on both their functional performance and their contribution to collective results.
Questions for You and Your Team
Before moving on, take a few minutes to reflect on these questions. The goal isn't to have perfect answers—it's to surface whether this pattern might be affecting your team.
Does your leadership team have explicit, shared metrics that they own collectively—metrics they would be embarrassed to miss even if their individual function performed well? Without shared targets, local optimization is rational.
When was the last time one of your functional leaders voluntarily made their job harder because it was better for the company? When did you last celebrate that behavior? The presence or absence of this behavior tells you whether leaders are optimizing for the team or themselves.
If your best functional leader's success came at the expense of company-level outcomes, how would you handle it? Would you even notice? The answer reveals whether you're measuring and valuing collective results or just individual performance.
Take the Next Step
If you want to see where your leadership team stands on collective accountability and five other critical dimensions, take the Leadership Team Assessment. It's a free 15-minute diagnostic that scores your team across the factors that determine whether you'll scale smoothly or hit the same walls repeatedly.
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About the Author
Bruce Eckfeldt is a strategic business coach and exit planning advisor who helps founder-CEOs of growth-stage companies scale systematically and exit successfully. A former Inc. 500 CEO who built and sold his own company, he brings real-world operational experience to strategic planning and leadership development. He's a certified ScalingUp and 3HAG/Metronomics coach, Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA), an Inc. Magazine contributor, and host of the "From Angel to Exit" podcast. Bruce works with growth companies in complex industries, guiding leadership teams through growth challenges and exit preparation. Reach him at bruce@eckfeldt.com with any questions or if you want more information or to book a call with him.
