A named failure mode where two senior leaders — classically co-founders — each give a team conflicting direction on the same workstream, leaving the team caught between authorities. The fix isn't better communication between the team and each leader; it's the two leaders explicitly resolving who is accountable, so only one direction reaches the team.
Practical rule: if a co-leader is already actively engaged with a workstream, confirm they own it and fully step back rather than layering in a second, possibly conflicting, set of direction. Related to Escalation to Shared Authority and Founder–Leader Ownership Map.
Tamar Yehoshua names the same dynamic in PM/engineering pairs: when ownership between a product leader and an engineering leader isn't explicitly divided, people learn to "ask mom, ask dad" — shopping a request to whichever leader is more likely to say yes, playing the two against each other. The fix is not a single all-powerful owner but an explicit division of ownership plus continuous effort to stay aligned as the org and roadmap shift; alignment decays if it isn't actively maintained (see Alignment Decays Over Time). She treats evaluating this partnership, before joining a company, as a prerequisite — see Evaluate the Engineering Partnership Before Joining a Company.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust