There is a sentence that can stop work without technically refusing it.

“That’s not my job.”

Sometimes it is completely reasonable. People need clear responsibilities, realistic workloads, and the right to challenge work that does not belong with them.

But sometimes the sentence really means, “I can see the problem, but our system rewards me for moving it away.”

That is not role clarity. It is organizational self-defence.

A customer does not experience your org chart. They experience whatever happens between its boxes.

The ticket everybody correctly rejected

Imagine a Deskside Support team receiving repeated reports that laptops lose access to a critical application after a security update. Deskside confirms the devices are healthy and sends the tickets to Applications. Applications says the software works and redirects them to Packaging. Packaging confirms the package installed correctly and assigns them to Security.

Security sees no policy failure and returns them to Deskside.

Every team has evidence. Every handoff is defensible. Meanwhile, 300 employees are restarting devices, repeating diagnostics, and explaining the same issue to different people. The Service Desk backlog grows, resolution targets are missed, and the customer escalates because nobody appears to own the service failure.

Eventually, an engineer from Packaging and an analyst from Security compare logs together. The update changed a certificate dependency the application team had not documented. The technical fix takes 40 minutes. Reaching shared ownership took four days.

Employees become frustrated because doing the “right” procedural thing produces no useful outcome. Service delivery absorbs transfers and duplicated effort. Customers lose productive time and trust. The organization pays for several teams to avoid one problem in sequence.

When every team protects its boundary, the unresolved problem becomes the only thing working across departments.

Why the handoff feels so safe

People respond to incentives and social risk. If employees are measured on queue age, closure volume, or whether tickets remain inside their group, transferring work can feel safer than collaborating on an uncertain problem.

We also tend to interpret ambiguous situations in ways that protect our existing view. That can make each team’s evidence feel conclusive: the device works, the package installed, the policy applied. None of those facts proves the service works end to end.

This is not a neuroscience excuse for poor accountability. It is a reminder that local measures and narrow roles can quietly train capable people to optimize their part while the customer absorbs the whole.

Give the problem an owner, not another destination

Managers should make one person accountable for coordinating complex issues until service is restored, even when several teams must contribute. Ownership does not mean doing everyone else’s work. It means keeping the outcome visible, convening the right expertise, and ensuring the next handoff does not become abandonment.

Use shared service measures alongside team measures. Track transfers, repeated diagnostics, customer effort, and time spent waiting between groups. Review cases that crossed multiple queues and ask where collaboration failed.

Leaders also need to reward curiosity and practical support: “It may not be our component, but what can we contribute to finding the cause?” That is collaboration with boundaries—not boundarylessness.

A good handoff transfers context and responsibility. A bad one transfers inconvenience.

Key Takeaways

  • Keep roles clear without making them walls.
  • Assign one owner for the end-to-end outcome.
  • Measure customer effort and cross-team delay.
  • Transfer context, not just a ticket number.
  • Reward collaboration on ambiguous problems.

Discussion question: Where does work most often fall between teams in your organization—and who owns picking it up?