Yes, you (probably) have a cabling problem...
What do you mean 'your company is not open to using LACP'? If you're using channels with no signalling, then your company deserves a kicking. NEVER EVER configure a channel in production without singalling. It may work today, but it probably wont' work tomorrow. And you'll spend your days trying to discover why. Your company is having a laugh if they think this is going to work well. (And I don't care if its working in production today. Like I said, it probably won't tomorrow... And etherchannel problems without signalling are the worst things to try & debug. Especially when production traffic is on them and your company starts yelling at you to fix it).
Sorry...
If it helps, you could always point them at the cisco docs that also advise you not to configure channels without signalling...
FWIW you get this if you try to configure channels with ESX as well... That does channelling and doesn't understand LACP at all...
H