You Are the Conditions Your Team Works In

Much of what feels personal at work is not personal.

I run a simulation built on Barry Oshry's work on organisational power and systems. You put a roomful of people into a made-up organisation - some at the top, some in the middle, some at the bottom - and let it run. Within half an hour, the people at the top are overwhelmed, buried under the responsibility they keep absorbing. The ones at the bottom feel ignored and shut out of decisions that affect them. The middles are torn in two, trying and failing to please everyone at once.

Then I ask whether any of it feels familiar. Heads start nodding before I finish the question.

Nobody in that room is a difficult person. They walk in as the kind, capable people they are. Half an hour later the same people are overwhelmed, resentful, defensive - not because of who they are, but because of where they are standing. Or, as Oshry puts it: much that seems personal is not personal.

How your meetings work. Who gets heard and who gets talked over. What gets rewarded, and what gets someone sidelined. What happens when a person brings you a problem. The behaviour you find most frustrating in your team is, in large part, a response to all of that.

Which is why the instinct to fix the person so often fails. The person is the hardest thing to change and the least within your control. The conditions are yours. Change them, and you are not fixing anyone - you are making room for a different set of behaviours to show up.

It is also the kinder way to lead. Once you see behaviour as a response to conditions, you stop reading it as character. You take it less personally, and so does everyone else. The team stops asking who to blame and starts asking what to change.

This is the work I spend my time on: helping leadership teams and whole organisations see the conditions they are operating inside, and then change them. The simulation is just the most vivid version of it - a room full of people watching their own organisation play out in front of them. The principle runs through all of it. Start with the system, not the individual.