The Hidden Contradiction in How Organizations Develop People
Written by Nassim Ebrahimi, Developmental Psychologist, Mental Performance Coach, Author, and Speaker
Coach Nassim Ebrahimi, PhD, is the founder of Becoming My Stronger Me, LLC. As a developmental psychologist, mental performance coach, podcaster, and author, she empowers athletes, coaches, and parents to unlock confidence, mental resilience, and peak performance through evidence-based strategies grounded in sport psychology and human development.
Organizations invest considerable time and resources developing people. They teach leaders to communicate more effectively, encourage employees to become more resilient, ask teams to take greater ownership, promote innovation, invest in wellbeing, and provide training on confidence, accountability, emotional intelligence, and managing pressure.
Then people return to environments that may unintentionally reinforce the opposite behaviors.
Employees are encouraged to take initiative but need approval for every meaningful decision. Teams are told to innovate but learn that mistakes carry consequences. Leaders attend workshops on communication but return to cultures where speed is valued more than listening.
This is the hidden contradiction in how many organizations approach development. We identify qualities we want people to strengthen without always examining whether the environment around them supports those same qualities.
Individual development matters. Training matters. Coaching matters. Personal responsibility matters. But if we want development to transfer beyond a workshop, coaching session, or leadership retreat, we also have to ask whether the environment reinforces what we are trying to develop.
Development can fail even when the training works
When a development initiative does not produce lasting change, we often question the initiative or the person. Did the training work? Did the person apply what they learned? Those are reasonable questions, but they are incomplete.
Imagine a manager attends leadership training and learns to give team members greater ownership. The manager returns motivated to change, but significant decisions still require multiple levels of approval. When something goes wrong, senior leaders immediately want to know who made the decision. Over time, the manager becomes cautious again.
Was the training ineffective? Not necessarily. The person may have learned exactly what the training intended. The environment simply continued teaching a competing lesson.
People learn from what gets rewarded, what gets punished, how mistakes are handled, and what happens when someone disagrees. The workshop creates one environment. The workplace creates another. Eventually, behavior has to survive in the second one.
What the environment is teaching
Consider confidence and ownership. Organizations want people who trust their judgment, take initiative, and make decisions. Confidence, however, requires opportunities to act.
Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy emphasized the importance of mastery experiences in developing belief in one's capabilities. Yet a leader may say, “I trust you,” while reviewing every decision. An employee may be told, “This is your project,” but receive detailed instructions for every step.
Over time, people adapt. They may wait for direction because experience has taught them that someone else ultimately owns the decision. That behavior may later be interpreted as a lack of confidence or initiative, even though the environment has helped produce it.
A similar contradiction appears with innovation and resilience. Organizations want people to experiment, solve problems, navigate setbacks, and adapt. But if unsuccessful ideas become evidence of poor judgment, people learn to protect themselves. If admitting a mistake creates humiliation, people learn to hide mistakes.
Resilience creates another question. Sometimes people need stronger strategies for navigating difficulty. Sometimes the environment needs to stop creating unnecessary difficulty. Those are not the same problem.
We see the contradiction again with emotional regulation and pressure. Organizations expect people to remain composed and perform when demands increase, yet employees may watch leaders respond to bad news with anger, defensiveness, blame, or panic.
The stated expectation is regulation. The modeled behavior is reactivity.
Emotions are data. They tell us something about what matters, what feels threatened, and what requires our attention. Pressure also provides information, but it should not become purely evaluative. People need opportunities to experience challenge, reflect, adjust, and try again before every difficult moment becomes a test of whether they can perform.
The goal is not to remove standards, accountability, challenge, or pressure. It is to become more intentional about what those experiences are teaching.
What these contradictions reveal
Confidence, innovation, resilience, ownership, emotional regulation, and performance under pressure may appear to be different organizational challenges. But the contradictions underneath them reveal a common problem.
We often locate development within the individual while treating the environment as though it were simply the place where development gets used.
Developmental psychology suggests something more dynamic. People and environments continually influence one another. People bring beliefs, skills, experiences, emotions, and behaviors into an environment, while the environment provides feedback about what is valued, expected, safe, possible, and rewarded.
The environment is not merely where development is demonstrated. It is part of how development happens.
If an employee hesitates to make decisions, confidence may be part of the issue, but so might a history of being second-guessed. If a team avoids difficult conversations, communication skills may need attention, but so might what people have experienced after speaking honestly.
We cannot consistently create one set of conditions and expect them to produce a completely different set of behaviors.
What BRIDGE™ adds to the conversation
These contradictions are part of what led me to develop the BRIDGE™ Operating System.
BRIDGE™ considers six interconnected capacities: Building Belonging, Regulating Emotions, Inspiring Identity, Developing Discipline, Growing Under Pressure, and Empowering Confidence. In organizations, none develops separately from the environment.
Consider an organization that believes its people need to take more initiative. The immediate response may be to focus on confidence, accountability, or motivation.
A BRIDGE™ lens encourages us to look at more of what is happening.
Do people experience enough belonging to risk being wrong? What happens when someone makes an imperfect decision? Are responsibilities clear enough to support consistent action? Have people had opportunities to make decisions under pressure? Have they accumulated enough evidence and role clarity to trust themselves?
Greater initiative may still be needed. What changes is our understanding of what may be influencing it.
BRIDGE™ does not remove individual responsibility from the conversation. It expands the conversation enough to include the conditions surrounding that responsibility.
Development requires alignment
Organizations do not need to stop investing in training, coaching, workshops, or leadership development. The challenge begins when formal development and everyday experience tell different stories.
A leader can learn to delegate and return to a culture where every mistake made by the team is treated as evidence that delegation was irresponsible. An executive can encourage transparency while difficult information continues to carry professional risk.
Individuals still have responsibility for applying what they learn. But organizations should also become curious about what happens when they try.
Does the new behavior receive support when it becomes inconvenient? Do systems, incentives, and leadership responses reinforce it or quietly pull people back toward what they were doing before?
Development is happening in those moments.
The meeting after something goes wrong becomes development. The response to disagreement becomes development. The decision to give someone meaningful responsibility becomes development.
Organizations are developing people all the time, whether they intend to or not. The question is what people are learning.
Final thoughts
The hidden contradiction in organizational development appears when the qualities being developed formally are undermined by the conditions people experience every day.
Seeing that contradiction does not mean abandoning individual development. It means making the environment part of the development conversation.
When you identify something you want your people to do differently, consider not only what they need to learn, but what they are already learning from the environment every day.
Are they learning that mistakes can become information, or that mistakes threaten reputation? Are they learning that responsibility comes with meaningful authority, or that ownership ends when a decision becomes uncomfortable? Are they learning that pressure is something they can develop within, or something they are expected to endure successfully the first time it matters?
Then compare those lessons with the qualities your organization says it wants to develop.
The gap between the two may be where some of the most important development work begins.
Read more from Nassim Ebrahimi
Nassim Ebrahimi, Developmental Psychologist, Mental Performance Coach, Author, and Speaker
Coach Nassim Ebrahimi, PhD, is the founder of Becoming My Stronger Me, LLC. As a developmental psychologist, mental performance coach, podcaster (Becoming My Stronger Me podcast), author (The Stronger Mind and Baller Goals), and speaker, she empowers athletes, coaches, and parents to unlock mental resilience and peak performance under pressure through evidence-based strategies grounded in sport psychology and human development. She holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University. Through her work, she supports individuals and teams in developing the mental skills needed to thrive in sport and life. Her mission is to help people train their minds with the same intention they train their bodies.
References:
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Lazarus, R. S., and Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
