How do I get my operations stakeholders to stop pulling in different directions?

Everyone is pulling their own way and you are caught in the middle, spending your days refereeing instead of running things. That state is draining, and it is not because you are weak. It is because no shared direction has been made plain, so each person defaults to their own. People pull apart when they cannot see a common goal worth aligning to. The fix is rarely more meetings or more diplomacy in the moment. It is naming, clearly and repeatedly, the one outcome everyone is actually there to serve. Without that fixed point, every conversation restarts the argument. Gather your key stakeholders and, together, write down the single priority that ranks above the rest for this quarter. Get them to agree to it out loud. Then, when someone pulls sideways, you have something solid to point back to. Alignment is not a personality you lack. It is a shared goal you have not yet pinned down.