Thinking · November 2026 · Barking Cat series
Why does growth stall when every team is hitting its target?
Because the targets were set one team at a time. Misaligned objectives create friction, and friction blocks growth. Each team can hit a target that makes sense on its own while the business misses the result it actually needed, and the more of its growth depends on teams working together, the more it loses.
Nobody has to behave badly for this to happen. Everybody is doing what they were asked to do.
Why growth is where it bites
Running the business as it is can survive misaligned targets, because each team can do its own part well. Growing it is harder. A new channel, a launch, a peak event, a new market or a new kind of customer needs several teams to move at once, and each of those moves helps one team’s number and costs another’s.
That is where the friction comes from. It shows up as time spent arguing about who gets the credit, work done twice because two teams are measured on different versions of it, decisions that wait because nobody owns the shared result, and teams optimising against each other. None of it appears in a P&L. All of it slows the thing the board most wants.
Where it shows
The arithmetic of the first pair shows how far apart two correct numbers can drift. With invented numbers: a site has 100,000 visits and 2,500 orders, a conversion rate of 2.5%. Marketing adds 25,000 cheap visits that bring 50 orders. Visits are up a quarter and orders are up 2%, so Marketing has hit its target. Conversion has fallen to 2.04%, so ecommerce has missed its target. The business sold more, and the two teams spend the next month arguing about whose fault that was.
The pairs below are the kind to look for, in a retailer or in any consumer business that sells through more than one channel. Each target is reasonable on its own. The problem is what they do side by side.
| One team is judged on | Another is judged on | What happens side by side |
|---|---|---|
| Trading: gross revenue | Commercial: gross margin | Trading buys volume with discounts and promotions; Commercial resists the margin they cost |
| Ecommerce: net profit | Marketing: brand awareness | Brand spend looks like a cost to one and an investment to the other, and nobody can agree what it returned |
| IT: cost reduction | Operations: opening a new distribution centre | The new site needs systems investment that IT is paid to avoid |
| Buying: availability and full-price sell-through | Finance: stock cover and working capital | Buying wants depth so nothing sells out; Finance wants less money tied up in stock |
| Marketing: traffic or new customers | Ecommerce: conversion rate | Cheap traffic hits one target and drags the other down |
| Stores: their own till | Online: online sales | The website is treated as a rival rather than a route to the same customer |
| Customer service: cost per contact | Ecommerce or CRM: repeat purchase | Contacts are kept short to hit the cost, and the customer does not come back |
| Wholesale: volume with partners | Direct: full-price sales | Partners discount the products the brand is trying to sell at full price |
| Supply chain: cost to serve | Merchandising: range breadth | Every new line adds cost to one team and choice to the other |
Two explanations, and the one that leads
The first is that the teams are not working hard enough together: a culture problem, fixed by away days and better relationships. Relationships matter, but they do not survive a target that pays one team for the other’s loss.
The second is that the targets were never designed to fit together. I think this one leads, because it explains why good people in good relationships still end up in the same argument every year. What would prove me wrong is a business where every growth initiative has one shared target, and the friction persists anyway.
What to do before next year’s targets are set
Put the KPIs of every team that touches the same customer on one page, side by side. Look for pairs where one team can hit its number by making another miss theirs. The table above is a starting list, not a complete one, and every business will have its own pairs.
Then, for each growth initiative in the plan, set one shared target that every team involved is judged on, and agree before it starts how the credit will be split and what would have happened without it. The cheaper middle route is to do this only for the two or three initiatives the plan depends on most, and leave the rest of the targets as they are for a year.
How you will know
The measure is the shared result of each growth initiative, read quarterly against what the plan said. The guardrail is each team’s own core numbers, so that alignment on growth does not hollow out the day job. A useful early sign is the agenda of the monthly trading review: if less of it is spent on who gets the credit, the targets are starting to fit.
The decision
The decision for the board is whether growth initiatives get shared targets, and who sets them. The question for Monday: which two of our teams could both hit their targets this year while the business misses its own?
This piece rests on one operator’s record. It cannot tell you how much growth friction costs a typical retailer, and I have not found anyone who has measured it.
Related: The Barking Cat problem; Ecommerce KPI Framework.
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