You Weren't Supposed to Solve That. That's What the Crossover Point Is For

Here is a scenario that plays out in nearly every organization, repeatedly, and is almost always handled badly.

The Sales Director needs a budget allocation to hit their revenue target. The Finance Director is accountable for staying within budget. The Finance Director cannot give the Sales Director what they need without going over. Both know their mandates. Neither has authority over the other. And both are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.

What happens next is usually one of three things: they negotiate a compromise that satisfies neither and serves the organization poorly; they go around each other, creating workarounds that erode accountability; or one of them absorbs the problem quietly and takes the hit — missing the goal or quietly exceeding the budget and hoping no one notices.

The one thing they don't do is escalate. And in this case, that is a problem.

The conflict is structural, not interpersonal

The first thing to understand clearly is that this is not a relationship or a communication problem. These two directors are not failing to collaborate. They are in genuine structural tension. Each is accountable for something real, each is constrained by what the other controls, with no authority to override each other.

Trying to solve it through better dialogue, more alignment sessions, or collaborative frameworks is the wrong diagnosis. The tension is not a symptom of dysfunction. It is what a correctly designed accountability structure looks like when two legitimate mandates come into conflict.

The problem is not the tension. The problem is what the organization has taught people to do with it.

Why neither director can resolve this — and shouldn't try.

There are two distinct reasons this conflict exceeds what either director can resolve, and both matter.

The first is authority

The Sales Director's revenue accountability was given to them from above. So was the Finance Director's budget mandate. Neither of them has the authority to downgrade their own accountability unilaterally — to decide that their goal matters less in this instance. That authority belongs to whoever assigned those accountabilities in the first place.

The second is perspective

Even if one of them was willing to make the call, they lack the strategic vantage point to know what the right answer is for the organization. The Sales Director sees revenue. The Finance Director sees cost. Neither sees the full picture — what this quarter's budget pressure means against the annual growth target, what missing this particular sales number costs in customer relationships or market position, what precedents either decision sets. That information doesn't live at their level. It lives higher up.

This is also not a failure of context. Having good context helps managers make more informed decisions, but only until the decisions meet the boundaries of their roles. In this case, the Sales Director could fully brief the Finance Director on why this spend is essential. The Finance Director could fully brief the Sales Director on the budget pressures they are navigating. More information exchanged between them would not change the situation. The constraint is not informational — it is structural. 

Neither the authority nor the strategic perspective required to make this call lives at their level, regardless of how well they understand each other's position.

The crossover point

In a previous article I introduced the concept of the crossover point manager — the role in the hierarchy that is accountable for both functions simultaneously. In this scenario, that is whoever has both Sales and Finance within their scope of accountability. That role is the only place in the organization where this conflict can be legitimately and intelligently resolved.

Sometimes that role is one level up. The two directors share a direct manager who owns both functions. In that case, escalation is smooth and short.

But often it is not that simple. There may be two or three layers between the directors and the actual crossover point. A VP of Sales and a VP of Finance above them, neither of whom is the crossover point either. Those intermediate layers don't resolve the conflict. They absorb it and pass it up. And each intermediate manager faces the same structural question the directors faced: do I have the authority and the perspective to make this call, or does this exceed my level too?

The discipline required is not just at the originating level. It runs through the chain. Each layer that tries to resolve what isn't theirs to resolve creates a false resolution — one that will surface again, usually at a worse moment.

Of course, for this process to work, the crossover point manager needs to recognize that their role is accountable for resolving this type of conflict, and be willing to create a safe space for escalation. If they fail to do that, then escalation will be seen as too riskly or pointless.

What good escalation looks like

There is a significant difference between escalating well and escalating poorly.

Escalating poorly looks like two people arriving separately at the next level up, each framing the other as the obstacle. The manager above is put in the position of referee rather than decision-maker — and if that manager isn't the crossover point either, the noise travels upward unfiltered.

Escalating well starts with the two directors sitting down together — not to resolve the conflict, but to frame it precisely. What is the actual decision the organization faces? What does missing the sales goal cost, and what does going over budget cost? They quantify both paths and bring that analysis jointly to the next level, with a clear statement: this exceeds our authority to resolve.

If that level isn't the crossover point either, the same discipline applies. The conflict moves upward as a clean, bounded decision until it reaches the role with both the authority and the strategic perspective to make a more informed call.

What to offer people in this situation

If you are working with leaders who find themselves in this conundrum, the most useful thing you can give them is not a technique for resolving it without escalating. It is structural clarity about why escalation is the right move, and what good escalation requires.

The goal is not to avoid going upward. The goal is to travel upward the right way: a precisely framed decision, quantified trade-offs, a joint presentation, and the professional clarity to say "this is not ours to resolve".

That is not weakness or a failure of confidence. That is accurate self-knowledge about the limits of your authority and your perspective. Both are legitimate limits. Both are built into the structure on purpose. Ignoring them is a bad call.