Beyond the Turf War: A Leader’s Guide to Transforming Conflict into Collaboration

“The heart and soul of good alignment and collaboration is mutual understanding”

Atip Muangsuwan
CEO Coach and Coach Supervisor

How one global executive learned to bridge the gap between manufacturing and sales—and why mutual understanding is the only strategy that works.

Every leader knows the feeling. You’re driving toward a critical business goal—a product launch, a quarterly target, a strategic initiative—and suddenly, you hit a wall. Not a market wall. Not a resource wall. A people wall. Departments are pointing fingers. Subsidiaries are guarding their turf. And somewhere in the middle of all that friction, momentum grinds to a halt.

I recently sat down with a leader I’ll call Charlie. He runs a global company, overseeing multiple subsidiaries across different markets. On paper, his structure makes perfect sense: one company focuses on manufacturing, another on sales. The manufacturer produces the product; the sales company sells it. Simple, logical, efficient.

Except it wasn’t working.

Charlie described a growing tension between the two subsidiaries—a friction born not of bad intentions but of something far more insidious: different work cultures, different ways of operating, different definitions of success. The manufacturing team, rooted in precision, process, and quality control, saw the sales team as reckless and overpromising. The sales team, driven by targets, urgency, and customer demands, saw the manufacturing team as rigid and unresponsive.

Sound familiar?

Charlie brought this to our coaching session with a clear goal: How do I create better collaborations across these subsidiaries? How do I get them aligned?

What emerged from our conversation wasn’t just a set of tactics. It was a fundamental shift in how Charlie—and any leader facing similar challenges—can approach cross-team or cross-company collaboration. The answer, as it turns out, is simpler and more profound than most leaders expect.

The Real Cost of Misalignment

Before we get to solutions, let’s be clear about what’s at stake. Charlie identified three compelling reasons to solve this collaboration gap:

• Revenue. Better collaborations directly increase sales numbers and revenue. When manufacturing and sales are aligned, products move faster, customer promises are kept, and the entire revenue engine runs smoother.
• Cost reduction. Misalignment creates waste—rework, expedited shipping, customer compensation, management time spent refereeing disputes. Solving these conflicts now prevents unnecessary costs down the road.
• Relationships. This is the invisible cost that often does the most damage. When teams are constantly at odds, trust erodes. People stop communicating openly. They protect their turf instead of pursuing shared goals.

Charlie’s situation is not unique. In fact, it’s the classic “sales versus service” conflict that plays out in organizations everywhere. The sales team promises the moon; the service team has to deliver on an unrealistic timeline. The result is the same everywhere: conflict, frustration, and missed objectives.

But here’s what most leaders get wrong about conflict.

Reframing Conflict: From Threat to Signal

Most leaders see conflict as a sign of failure. Something has gone wrong. Someone isn’t pulling their weight. Heads need to roll.

I’ve learned to see it differently. Conflict is not a failure. It’s a signal. It tells you where alignment is breaking down. It reveals the gaps between what different teams think they’re supposed to do and what they’re actually doing. And most importantly, it offers you a choice: ignore it and let it fester, or step into it and use its energy to build something stronger.

Charlie chose the latter. And to help him, I shared the framework.

The LAR-SE Model: Creating Mutual Understanding

The foundation of any successful collaboration is not process, not KPIs, not even shared incentives. It’s mutual understanding. Without it, you’re just papering over the cracks.

But what does mutual understanding actually look like in practice? This is where the LAR-SE model comes in. It’s a structured approach to dialogue that I’ve used with leaders across industries, and it works because it forces both parties to do something most of us resist: truly listen before we speak.

Here’s how it works.

L: Listen Actively and Deeply

You cannot understand someone you haven’t truly heard. Active listening is about accurately receiving the speaker’s message—nodding, maintaining eye contact, asking clarifying questions. But deep listening goes further. It connects you to the speaker’s underlying emotions, intentions, motivations, and needs.

When Charlie sits down with his counterpart at the sales subsidiary, his first job is not to explain manufacturing’s constraints. It’s to hear the sales team’s reality. What pressures are they under? What do their targets look like? What keeps their leadership up at night?

A: Ask Powerful Questions

Most leaders ask questions to gather information. But in the LAR-SE model, questions serve a different purpose: to evoke awareness. A powerful question is open-ended, thought-provoking, relevant, and empowering. It can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” It challenges assumptions and opens new perspectives.

Here are a few powerful questions Charlie might ask the sales team’s managing director:

• “What does a win look like for your team this quarter?”
• “What’s the hardest part of your job when it comes to working with us?”
• “If you could change one thing about how we collaborate, what would it be?”

These questions don’t just gather data. They create space for reflection. They invite the other person to think—and to feel heard.

R: Reflect Back What You Hear

Reflection is the secret weapon of great communicators. When you reflect back what you’ve heard, you’re doing two things: you’re ensuring you’ve understood correctly, and you’re showing the other person that you genuinely care about getting it right.

Reflection can take many forms: paraphrasing key points, summarizing the core message, acknowledging the emotions behind the words, or identifying patterns the speaker might not have noticed themselves.

For Charlie, this might sound like: “So if I’m hearing you correctly, the sales team feels like they’re not looped in early enough on production timelines, which puts them in a difficult position with their biggest customers. Is that right?”

S: Share Your Perspective

Most leaders get this step wrong. They start here. They lead with their own concerns, their own constraints, their own version of the story.

But sharing comes after listening, asking, and reflecting—not before. Once the other party feels truly understood, they become open to understanding you. That’s when you share your information, data, facts, knowledge, feedback, thoughts, insights, and even feelings.

And here’s the critical piece: when you share, don’t hide behind corporate speak. Show vulnerability. Show your humanity. Share not just the facts of manufacturing’s challenges but how those challenges feel. What worries you? What keeps you up at night? When you share your authentic self, you invite the other person to do the same.

E: Empower or Encourage

The final step depends on who you’re talking to. When coaching your direct reports, empower them—give them the tools, autonomy, and confidence to solve problems themselves. When talking with peers, senior leaders, or colleagues, encourage them. Encourage them to talk more (which means you’re listening more, which means you’re understanding more).

The key insight: listening more is understanding more. And understanding is the foundation of everything that follows.

The purpose of LAR-SE is not to win an argument. It’s to create a dialogue—a genuine, two-way exchange that builds mutual understanding between both parties. As I shared with Charlie, “The best communicator is not the one who speaks most eloquently. It’s the one who can create the clearest understanding between both parties.”

The EE-FI Leadership Model: From Understanding to Influence

Understanding alone isn’t enough. You have to act on it. That’s where the EE-FI Leadership Model comes in—a framework I developed specifically for leaders like Charlie who need to build influence across organizational boundaries.

E: Engage Regularly and Frequently

Collaboration doesn’t happen in quarterly reviews. It happens in the spaces between: weekly check-ins, quick alignment calls, informal conversations over coffee. Charlie committed to engaging with the sales company’s managing director and his leadership team on a predictable, frequent basis. Not just when there was a problem—all the time.

E: Empathize to Understand

This is the work we’ve already covered. Empathy is not about agreeing with someone; it’s about understanding their needs, expectations, motivations, concerns, worries, and fears. When you truly understand what drives the other party, you gain leverage you didn’t have before.

Charlie’s insight here was important: he’d always relied on gut-feeling and experience to navigate these relationships. And while that served him well, he recognized that incorporating a structured framework would bring consistency to his decisions and outcomes.

F: Fulfill Their Needs

Here’s where most leaders get stuck. They assume that “fulfilling needs” means giving in—compromising their own position to make the other party happy.

That’s not what this means.

Fulfilling needs means finding the intersection between what they want and what you can deliver. It means asking yourself: What’s in it for them? How can I contribute to their values or benefits? This is the heart of negotiation: finding the win-win solution that serves both parties.

For Charlie, this might mean giving the sales team earlier visibility into production timelines—something that costs manufacturing little but delivers tremendous value to sales.

I: Influence Will Follow

Here’s the beautiful part: you don’t have to demand influence. You don’t have to assert authority or pull rank. When you’ve engaged with people regularly, empathized with their needs, and helped fulfill those needs, influence comes to you naturally and automatically.

People follow leaders who understand them. They trust leaders who have demonstrated care for what matters to them. They collaborate with leaders who have shown up consistently, listened authentically, and delivered value.

Charlie left our session with a clear action plan: start engaging with the sales company’s managing director and his leadership team using the EE-FI model. He also committed to continuing coaching his two direct reports—partly to develop his own coaching skills, partly to model the approach throughout his organization.

The Deeper Lesson: Know What You Don’t Know

One of the most powerful moments in our coaching session came when Charlie reflected on what he’d learned about himself.

“I’ve learned that I know only a little,” he said.

This wasn’t false modesty. It was genuine humility—and it’s one of the most important qualities any leader can cultivate. When you recognize the limits of your own knowledge, you become open to learning from others. You stop assuming you have all the answers. You start asking better questions.

Charlie also recognized that he appreciated the coaching approach itself—because it creates better relationships, better alignment, and a safe space for people to speak openly. That’s not soft leadership. That’s smart leadership. The leader who creates psychological safety gets information the tyrant never hears. And information is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Your Turn: A Challenge for Leaders

If you’re leading across subsidiaries, departments, or any organizational boundary where friction exists, I have a challenge for you.

Stop managing the conflict and start understanding it.

This week, schedule a conversation with your counterpart at the other organization. Don’t come with demands. Don’t come with a list of grievances. Come with curiosity. Use the LAR-SE model to guide the conversation. Listen to understand, not to respond. Ask questions that evoke awareness. Reflect back what you hear. Share your own perspective only after they’ve felt heard.

Then ask yourself: What do they need that I could help fulfill? What’s the win-win I haven’t seen before?

The leaders who master this approach don’t just resolve conflicts. They transform them into the fuel for strategic alignment. They build organizations where different perspectives are not threats to be managed but assets to be leveraged.

As Charlie summarized our session: “Applying the EE-FI Model to create better collaboration and alignment.”

And as I shared it with him: “The heart and soul of good alignment and collaboration is mutual understanding.”

Wisdom is understanding. And understanding is wisdom.

Are you looking to transform conflict into collaboration? If you are, then let’s LAR-SE and EE-FI!

About Atip Muangsuwan: Atip is an executive leadership coach who specializes in helping high-achieving leaders overcome internal barriers to unlock their full potential and drive organizational success. Through a blend of strategic frameworks and profound personal insights, he empowers leaders in transforming their mindsets, emotional states, and behaviors for lasting impact.