You need a new software tool approved. IT asks questions about security and integration. Your internal narrative: “Here we go again. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”
You want to hire someone quickly. HR requires documentation and process steps. Your response: “Can’t we just move faster? Why are they making this so hard?”
You need budget reallocated. Finance wants justification and analysis. Your conclusion: “They don’t understand how business really works. They’re just protecting their territory.”
Each of these reactions feels reasonable. Each one also represents a failure to see colleagues as people doing real work under real constraints. When support functions become “obstacles” in your mental model, you’ve reduced them from partners to problems, from people to processes standing in your way.
If you’re reading this because feedback surfaced this pattern, it means people in these functions have noticed. They experience you not as a collaborator but as someone who sees their work as an inconvenience. That perception shapes how they work with you, and not in ways that help you get what you need.
The Obstacle Narrative
Most leaders don’t consciously decide to treat support functions poorly. The obstacle frame emerges from a specific kind of self-focus. You’re trying to accomplish something. They’re requiring steps you didn’t want to take. The simplest explanation is that they’re getting in the way.
What this frame misses is everything about their reality: the risks they’re managing, the regulations they’re navigating, the past disasters that created the policies you find annoying. The IT security questions exist because someone, somewhere, got the company in serious trouble by not asking them. The HR documentation exists because employment law is unforgiving. The finance requirements exist because someone needs to keep the organization solvent.
The process you find annoying is usually the scar tissue from someone else’s wound.
The Arbinger Institute’s work on outward mindset is directly relevant here. When you see support functions with an inward mindset, you see them only in relation to your needs. They’re either helping you or blocking you. When you see them with an outward mindset, you see them as people with their own objectives, constraints, and pressures, which happen to intersect with yours.
What the Obstacle Mindset Costs You
Slower outcomes. This is the irony. Treating support functions as obstacles actually slows things down. People who feel treated as barriers are less likely to find creative solutions, less motivated to expedite your requests, less willing to flag when flexibility might be possible. You get compliance, not collaboration.
Worse solutions. Support functions often have information that would improve your decisions. IT knows about technical dependencies you don’t see. HR knows about employment patterns that affect retention. Finance sees budget dynamics across the organization. When you treat them as obstacles to navigate around, you lose access to intelligence that would help you.
Burned bridges. These relationships are repeat games. The IT manager you steamrolled on one project will be involved in the next one. The HR partner you dismissed will be handling your next hiring need. The reputation you build with support functions follows you and affects how much discretionary help you get.
Organizational friction. When leaders across the company treat support functions as obstacles, those functions become more defensive, more rule-bound, more risk-averse. The very behaviors you complain about are partly created by the pattern of treatment you contribute to.
The Masks
“I’m just trying to move fast.” Speed is often the justification. But speed that comes from ignoring legitimate concerns isn’t actually faster. It’s just relocating the cost to later, when the security breach happens, the hire doesn’t work out, or the budget problem surfaces.
“I respect individuals, I just don’t like the process.” The people and the process aren’t separable in the way this implies. When you complain about the process, you’re often complaining about people doing their jobs. They didn’t create the regulations or the risk environment. They’re navigating it.
“They need to be more business-minded.” This assumes your objectives are “the business” and theirs are something else. But managing legal risk is business. Protecting data is business. Maintaining financial controls is business. The business isn’t just your P&L.
“I’ve had bad experiences.” Maybe you have. But treating every IT request as if it will be mishandled, every HR interaction as if it will be bureaucratic, every finance review as if it will be obstructionist, ensures you’ll keep having bad experiences. You’re contributing to the pattern.
How to Change the Frame
Get curious about their objectives. What is this function actually trying to accomplish? What risks are they managing? What does success look like from their position? Understanding their goals helps you see requirements as purposeful rather than arbitrary.
Assume positive intent. The person asking questions or requiring steps is usually trying to do their job well, not trying to block you. Start from that assumption and you’ll engage differently. You might still disagree with the requirement, but you’ll disagree with a person, not a caricature.
Involve them earlier. Most friction with support functions comes from engaging them too late, when the decision is already made and you just need them to bless it. Bringing them in earlier, when there’s still flexibility, often produces better solutions with less resistance.
Learn what they actually do. The leader who understands what IT security is actually protecting against, what HR compliance actually requires, what finance controls actually prevent, engages those functions very differently than the leader who sees only obstruction. Knowledge breeds respect.
Find the humans. Build relationships with specific people in these functions. The general “IT” or “HR” or “finance” is an abstraction. The actual people doing the work are individuals with expertise, judgment, and often more flexibility than the process might suggest.
Ask how you can make their job easier. This is a mindset flip. Instead of asking how they can make your request faster, ask what you could do that would help them. What information do they need? What format saves them time? What context helps them process? This approach builds goodwill and often speeds things up.
The fastest way to get help from support functions is to treat them like people who want to help, not obstacles you need to overcome.
The Partnership Alternative
The leaders who get the most from support functions don’t do it by being demanding or by gaming the system. They do it by building genuine partnerships.
Partnership means understanding that your objectives and their objectives need to coexist. It means recognizing that their requirements usually have legitimate origins. It means investing in relationships before you need something urgently. It means treating these colleagues the way you’d want to be treated if someone saw your function as an obstacle to their goals.
This behavior shows up in 360 assessments because support functions talk to each other and to the people assessing you. They know which leaders treat them as partners and which treat them as problems. That knowledge shapes not just their perception of you but their willingness to stretch for you when it matters.
The organization works better when cross-functional relationships are collaborative rather than adversarial. You can’t fix the whole system. But you can fix how you show up. And that changes what’s possible.