The Leadership Mistake Hiding in Plain Sight
Sarah Merron is a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) trainer and self-leadership coach who has worked with business leaders, entrepreneurs, parents and athletes since 2008. She draws on NLP, hypnosis and Time Line Therapy® to help clients turn self-awareness into action. Her coaching helps people define success on their own terms and build a life that feels true to them.
Every organisation has a name it reaches for when things go wrong. A difficult director. A disengaged team. A high performer who has started to slip. But what if the person your organisation has identified as the problem is actually revealing how the organisation functions?
The name on the whiteboard
Picture a leadership offsite. Margins are under pressure, a launch has slipped, and a strategy that looked brilliant in the boardroom has stalled somewhere in the building. Within an hour, the conversation narrows. It always does. Someone says the name. The head of operations who “won’t let go”. The sales director who “doesn’t collaborate”. The team that “just isn’t bought in”.
There is relief in the room. A name is something you can act on. You can coach a name, manage its performance, restructure around it and, if necessary, replace it.
So the organisation does what organisations do. It invests in the individual. A coach is hired. A development plan is written. A 360° feedback review is commissioned. Six months later, either the person has gone or the behaviour has quietened just long enough for everyone to declare success.
Eighteen months on, someone new sits in the same chair and does remarkably similar things. This is an expensive leadership mistake. It rarely appears on a balance sheet because it is recorded as a cost of people rather than a cost of diagnosis.
Behaviour is a prediction, not a personality
People do not behave randomly inside organisations. They behave predictively. Every person in your business is running a continuous, largely unconscious calculation. What happens here when I raise a concern? What gets rewarded, and what merely gets praised? Who actually makes the decision, despite what the organisation chart says? What happened to the last person who took a risk and got it wrong?
The answers are not in your values statement. They are written in experience. Every meeting, every promotion and every silence after a difficult question teaches people what to expect. Over time, those lessons become the operating system everyone runs on.
So when a manager hoards decisions, ask what they have learned about what happens when delegated decisions go wrong. When a team withholds bad news, ask what they have learned about how bad news is received. When a talented leader goes quiet in meetings, ask what those meetings have taught them about the value of speaking.
The behaviour you can see is the output of a system you cannot. The person is not the source. The person is the evidence.
Why intelligent leaders keep getting the diagnosis wrong
Capable leadership teams make this mistake not for lack of intelligence but because it is structurally attractive.
Behaviour is visible. Cultural systems are not. You can watch someone dominate a meeting. You cannot watch the incentive structure, the unspoken history or the unclear decision rights that made dominating the meeting the most sensible move.
Psychology is on the side of the error. Social psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error. We explain other people’s behaviour by their character and our own by our circumstances. When we miss a deadline, it’s the situation. When they miss one, it’s who they are. Leadership teams are not immune to this. They are often its most fluent practitioners.
Individual interventions are easy to buy. You will have a budget for coaching, training and recruitment. Do you have a budget line for asking what the organisation itself is teaching?
The system includes the people doing the diagnosing. This is the uncomfortable one. To read the system honestly, a leadership team has to be open to finding itself in the data. It is far more comfortable for the problem to sit three levels down.
What the wrong diagnosis really costs
The direct costs are familiar. There’s the coaching contract, the recruitment fee and the months of lost momentum while a role sits empty or a new hire finds their feet. These costs are real, and they add up quickly.
The hidden costs are larger. Every time an organisation removes a person instead of examining a pattern, it teaches everyone watching a lesson. The lesson is not “We have high standards”. The lesson is “This is what happens to people who show us something we would rather not see”.
The predictive model tightens. People become more careful, more political, more silent. The very behaviours leadership complained about become more widespread, not less.
Meanwhile, the original pattern stays perfectly intact, ready for the next person to inherit. You have not solved the problem. You have reset the clock on it. The most valuable signal in the business, the person who was showing you how the organisation really works, has been treated as noise.
4 questions to ask before you intervene
None of this means individuals carry no responsibility. Sometimes the person genuinely is the wrong fit. But that conclusion should be earned, not assumed. Before investing in an individual intervention, test the diagnosis.
Has this pattern appeared before? If two people in the same position demonstrate the same behaviour, you are looking at a structural feature, not a personal flaw.
What would someone have to believe about this organisation for this behaviour to make sense? This is the most revealing question a leader can ask. Behaviour that looks irrational from the boardroom is usually rational from the inside.
What has this person learned to predict here? Trace the behaviour back to the experiences that taught it. Look at how decisions are really made, how mistakes are really handled and what is really rewarded.
Where are we, as a leadership team, in this pattern? This is a matter of accuracy, not blame. If leadership behaviour contributes to what people predict, that behaviour may also need to change.
If the answers point back to the individual, act decisively. If they point to the system, you have just saved yourself the cost of solving the wrong problem.
From fixing people to reading organisations
The shift asked of leaders here is subtle but profound. It means shifting their focus from individuals to the cultural systems within the organisation.
A leadership team that can read its organisation treats difficult behaviour as information. It becomes curious before it becomes corrective. It asks what a pattern of behaviour protects someone from, compensates for and predicts. Then it changes the conditions that produce the behaviour rather than repeatedly replacing the people who display it.
This is harder than hiring a coach. It is also far cheaper, far more durable and far more respectful of the intelligence of the people inside the business. Most people are not resisting your organisation. They are adapting to it, with remarkable precision.
The question worth sitting with
This is the territory of my forthcoming book, Are You Sure You Have a People Problem? What Your Organisation Has Taught Your People to Predict. It is written for chief executive officers, founders and senior leaders who are tired of solving the same problem.
Before the next restructure, coaching contract or difficult conversation, pause to consider one question. What if the person you have identified as the problem is the one showing you most clearly how your organisation really works? Answer that honestly, and you may discover you never had a people problem at all.
Read more from Sarah Merron
Sarah Merron, NLP Trainer & Self-Leadership Coach
Sarah Merron is an NLP trainer and self-leadership coach who has transformed mindsets since 2008. With her extensive experience, she has trained and coached individuals from all walks of life, including business leaders, entrepreneurs, parents, athletes, and more. Sarah’s expertise lies in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), hypnosis and Time Line Therapy® techniques. For 15 years, she has been helping people develop actionable self-insight and self-awareness and map their version of success. With her guidance, you can design an authentic life that truly feels like you.
