When you have someone following you in a car, how do you know if they noticed your turn signal? How do you know whether or not they intend to follow you around the turn?

Your best bet is to look in the rearview mirror and verify that they also switched on their blinker. When you're leading a team, you can do the same thing—sort of. Problem is that your people probably don't come to work every morning wearing little light bulbs sheathed under orange reflectors on their shoulders (or at least not when OSHA pays a visit). In the absence of that literal blinking light, you need another clear indicator of your team members' intentions to get out of the old lane and follow you into the new lane.

That was Jonathan's challenge.

His oath was kind of funny, kind of strange, and awfully effective at signaling his turn. But it wasn't yet clear that everyone was following him. He still needed to see their blinkers in his rearview mirror.

So after Jonathan finished his oath, we split the room up into the five major sub-teams. Each team was tasked with two objectives.

First, they created a 90-day sprint that identified the top three objectives they would commit to focusing on for the next 90 days.

Second, they created a waitlist with all the other objectives for the year that they would intentionally put on hold for 90 days or until their three sprint objectives were completed.

When they were finished, each team had a document that looked like this:

At that point, the permission ceremony continued. So after each of his direct reports finished their sprints and waitlists, I brought the microphone over to Cynthia, one of the members of Jonathan's leadership team. Looking at her team members assembled right in front of her, and visible to the entire department, she said, “I swear there will be no retribution for putting other priorities on the back burner until our team's top three priorities are completed.” From Cynthia, the mike traveled to Noney, who repeated the same oath. Noney was followed by Austin, then Mike, then Carol, and then Susan.

One by one, each of the six members of the department's leadership team switched on their blinkers for the rest of the department to see.

That's also when the road rage set in.

Susan was the last of Jonathan's direct reports to give her team permission to hold off on their defined waitlist. All seemed to be going well right up until she announced that “implement new loyalty program” was on her waitlist. She was the third of the five team leaders to relegate the loyalty program to her team's waitlist.

At that point, the fecal matter hit the fan.

Susan's peer, Cynthia, and her team were directly responsible for the loyalty program in the larger organization. For at least eight of the managers on Cynthia's team, the loyalty program was almost 100 percent of their job, and it had been for years. Before today, they had been told that their job was vitally important, not just to Cynthia's team, but to the entire organization. And now, it seemed as though half of the department—their trusted colleagues and friends—were announcing to a ballroom full of confidantes that their baby was ugly.

Not surprisingly, this upset the loyalty program team. I don't mean that chairs started flying or that the meeting suddenly erupted into a Jerry Springer episode. But the loyalty program team's discontent was obvious. In a delicious little irony, the loyalty program team felt that their peers were being viciously disloyal.

When you think about it, wouldn't you be a little perturbed too? What if half the people in your organization suddenly said, “Hey, you know that thing you do—that thing you've spent the past 18 months working overtime on, coming dangerously close to an imbalanced work-life relationship. Yeah…uh, that doesn't really matter to us. So we're gonna 86 it for a while.” How would that make you feel?

Typically, we chalk this up to the notorious problems of siloes and turf wars and an unwillingness to collaborate. But I'm not sure if that's it. It is simply human nature to feel bad when everybody seems to be ganging up on you, and when they devalue something that you highly value. It's natural to feel personally degraded and professionally frustrated.

At this point in our show one sing-songy word was running through everyone's mind: Awkwarrrddd.

I wish I could say that this was an isolated occurrence. But that would be a bold-faced lie. This awkwardness happens on cue, virtually every time I get to this part of a workshop. Invariably, some team's top priorities will wind up on another team's waitlist. When that knowledge is made public, things get uncomfortable. Not long ago, this exact scenario played out in a different organization. Only this time, the priority that got waitlisted belonged to the team led by the person who hired me. Their top priority was employee engagement, which was one of the organization's top four priorities overall. However, when the COO announced her team's 90-day waitlist, guess what was right there at the top? Yep—employee engagement. Oops. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

So why do I continue making teams do this exercise that makes the room so uncomfortable, and threatens my relationship with client contacts? Am I a sadist? Do I just like to see people squirm? Not at all. In fact, I'm nonconfrontational to a fault. My fragile ego really doesn't like to be the object of other people's scorn. So am I just dumb? Or am I really that bad at business development that I intentionally ostracize the people who are probably going to be signing my checks? Probably. But that's not why I do it.

Consider the alternative for Jonathan's team. Each of Jonathan's teams defines their 90-day priorities and their waitlists, but in order to avoid the awkwardness, they don't announce them to the rest of the department. In this scenario, everyone leaves the workshop feeling inspired, focused, and just positively chipper. They fly back home energized and ready to dig into their top priorities.

But then three days later someone from Cynthia's loyalty program team calls up someone from Susan's team and the conversation goes like this:

“Hey, friend, wasn't that a fun meeting last week?”

“Yep. Except for that clown Nick, everything else was great!”

“Yes, definitely. Anyway, I was just wondering when you think you'll be able to get that stuff to me you were working on for the loyalty program initiative?”

“Oh, yeah…that. Uh, well, you see…Susan said that, um…. Er, that's actually on my waitlist now.”

“Huh? What do you mean? Cynthia said it's my number one priority?”

“Uhhh….”

Whoops.

At this point, both people are confused and starting to get frustrated. Neither of them knows what to do. So one of two things will happen next.

If it's a highly collaborative culture, or the person from Susan's team is just a really nice person, he will disregard the top objectives on his own team's sprint and waitlist and say, “Okay, I'll get it to you by the end of the week. Will that work?” Never mind his own top priorities that he just signed off on a week before.

If, however, he is a confrontational person, he might instead say, “Sorry, bub, no can do. Orders are orders. You're just gonna have to wait. I know that the loyalty program is your top priority, but I'm afraid that also makes it your problem.” This time he has held his ground and remained focused. But in the process he has burnt a bridge and stifled the collaborative culture the organization has worked so hard to foster.

Neither scenario is especially good. So what is the alternative?

Answer: Address it head on, team leader to team leader, right then and there in the meeting.

Because we address this publicly at the workshop with all the teams and leaders in the room together, the leaders can get out in front of the inevitable conflicts that will happen with their team members down the road. To stave off bloodshed, however, I always reiterate that this is only a 90-day waitlist, and not a lifetime waitlist. In other words, it's only on the waitlist temporarily. So just because three of the five teams put the loyalty program on their waitlist for the next 90 days doesn't mean that the loyalty program won't be a top priority for all of them in the next 90 days.

Second, it doesn't even mean that the loyalty program is somehow less important to the department, or that this area isn't valued. In fact, what it meant in this case is that the loyalty program team had been doing their job so effectively in recent months that the loyalty program initiative didn't require special attention. Instead of being an insult, it was actually a compliment. The loyalty program—unlike the IT infrastructure—was already pretty effective, so it didn't need urgent attention.

Third, it didn't mean that the whole department should completely ignore the loyalty program. It just meant that the loyalty program was in a kind of temporary maintenance mode rather than improvement mode. It's like the loyalty program was in a job-sharing situation after coming back from paternity leave. Oftentimes people misinterpret the waitlist to mean that they are agreeing to let these projects slip into complete disrepair for the next 90 days. Understandably they object to this. But that's not what the waitlist means at all. It just means you aren't going to actively devote extra resources to improving the waitlist items—which is very different from saying you are going to let it get worse.

By publicly announcing each team's waitlists, Jonathan's leaders could make it clear that the waitlist is not a “blacklist,” and explain the thinking behind each of the waitlist items. Susan and Cynthia were able to lead by example and show their team members how it would look to constructively work through conflicting priorities with another team. On top of that, Jonathan was able to visibly check whether each of his direct reports had in fact signaled their intention to switch lanes. By the end of the Nairobi meeting, he was confident each of his top leaders clearly understood how the department's new priorities fit together, and how they were expected to put other things on hold in order to pursue them.

In the other organization where “employee engagement” was waitlisted by the COO, sharing the waitlist with the team helped her and the head of HR lead by example. The COO was able to explain that she put employee engagement on her waitlist not because she didn't think it was important. On the contrary, she felt it was so important to her team that she had already put a process in place weeks before that meeting in order to boost her team's engagement. So over the next 90 days she didn't need to devote additional creative resources to figuring out how to boost engagement—she simply needed to maintain the efforts she had already begun.

In turn, the HR director was able to further focus his team's pursuit of their top priority. Now instead of spending the next 90 days trying to boost staff engagement equally all across the organization, he decided to narrow his team's focus. By really digging into the engagement issues of only a few departments at a time every 90 days, they were able to apply more customized solutions that addressed the specific issues of each department rather than applying general and largely superficial engagement solutions to every department.