Your Team May Not Be the Problem, Your Leadership Might Be
Anne Rigaud-Walker is an Executive Coach and Strategic Transformation Practitioner working with senior leaders and leadership teams. Her work focuses on uncovering the invisible patterns and blind spots that shape behaviour, leadership and performance.
What if your team's lack of initiative, reluctance to challenge you, or constant need for approval isn't simply a people problem? What if the behaviours you find most frustrating are precisely the ones your leadership has unintentionally taught people to adopt?
What if you're the problem nobody dares to mention?
There is an uncomfortable possibility in leadership that rarely makes it onto the agenda. Your team may be having conversations about you that nobody is willing to have with you.
They know which subjects to avoid, how to deliver bad news without triggering an unnecessary reaction, when a disagreement is worth the effort, and when it is wiser to remain silent. They know which decisions they can genuinely make and which ones will eventually be overturned, regardless of the authority you have supposedly given them.
In some organisations, people become extraordinarily skilled at managing their manager. They anticipate reactions, adapt to preferences, and navigate invisible rules with remarkable precision. Meanwhile, the leader wonders why nobody challenges them, why every important decision comes back to their desk, or why their team seems incapable of taking genuine ownership.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Your team may understand your leadership patterns better than you do. And the people who have learned to work around those patterns may be the very people you believe are not performing at their full potential.
You may have trained your team to disappoint you
Consider a familiar leadership situation. A CEO is increasingly frustrated with his executive team. He has recruited experienced, talented people, yet he still feels responsible for every important decision.
"They need to step up," he says. "I can't keep doing everyone's job." Now imagine looking at what actually happened during his previous week.
On Monday, he overruled a decision made by one of his directors. On Tuesday, he rewrote a presentation because it wasn't quite how he would have done it. On Wednesday, he stepped into a difficult client conversation that belonged to another executive. By Friday, he had personally resolved several issues his team could have handled.
He sees himself as protecting standards and ensuring excellence. His team sees something else. Taking ownership is risky because he will probably intervene anyway.
And so they adapt. They seek approval earlier, avoid unnecessary disagreement, and bring fewer unfinished ideas to meetings. Gradually, they become exactly the team he complains about. The leader believes he has a delegation problem. He may actually have created a dependency system.
This is an illustrative scenario, but the mechanism is familiar across many organisations. People do not simply respond to the leadership principles displayed on a company's walls. They respond to the behaviours that are consistently rewarded, tolerated, or discouraged.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and team learning helps explain why this matters. When speaking up, admitting mistakes, or challenging assumptions feels interpersonally risky, the conditions for learning and open communication can deteriorate.
This is not about making leadership comfortable or eliminating accountability. It is about recognising that what feels perfectly reasonable from the leader's perspective may create a very different experience for everyone else.
Of course, not every organisational problem originates with the leader. Skills gaps, unclear strategy, insufficient resources, and individual performance issues are real. But when the same frustrations repeat across different people and situations, it may be worth examining the one element that has remained constant. Especially when that element is you.
Your greatest strength may have become your biggest blind spot
The behaviours that eventually create problems are often the very qualities that made a leader successful. Your speed built the business. Your attention to detail protected its reputation. Your ability to anticipate risks prevented costly mistakes. Your relentless standards created extraordinary results. Your willingness to take responsibility helped everyone through difficult moments.
These are not weaknesses. They may be exceptional strengths. Until the context changes. As an organisation grows, other people need room to develop judgment, assume responsibility, and make decisions that will not always resemble yours. Suddenly, your speed makes everyone else appear slow. Your competence discourages experimentation. Your standards make people reluctant to take risks. Your sense of responsibility prevents others from fully owning theirs. And because these qualities have been rewarded for years, questioning them can feel almost absurd.
Why would you change what made you successful?
Because the qualities that made you indispensable may now be preventing everyone else from becoming capable of leading without you.
There is a difference between being an exceptional performer and creating the conditions for exceptional performance around you. The first requires personal excellence. The second requires something considerably more challenging: allowing other people's excellence to emerge, even when it looks different from your own. And sometimes, that means confronting a question few leaders are particularly eager to explore.
What if part of you actually needs the problem?
We tend to assume that once a leader understands a dysfunctional behaviour, changing it should be relatively straightforward. If they recognise that they micromanage, they should delegate. If they know they become defensive, they should listen. If they understand that their impatience discourages others, they should become more patient.
It sounds reasonable. And yet, highly intelligent, experienced leaders frequently understand their patterns perfectly well and continue repeating them.
Why? Because the behaviour they want to change may still be protecting something they are not ready to lose.
A leader who complains that everything depends on them may also derive considerable identity from being indispensable. Someone who wants more autonomy in their team may experience vulnerability when decisions are made without them. A manager who says they welcome disagreement may unconsciously associate being challenged with losing authority, credibility, or competence.
These mechanisms should never be assumed without careful exploration. But they reveal an important possibility. What looks like resistance to change may sometimes be an attempt to preserve something psychologically important.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey explored this paradox through the concept of competing commitments, showing how people can genuinely pursue change while remaining attached to assumptions or commitments that work against it. Their article, The Real Reason People Won't Change, offers a useful perspective on why intention and insight do not always translate into different behaviour.
Consider the contradiction. You can sincerely want your team to become independent while remaining deeply uncomfortable with no longer being needed in the same way. You can want people to challenge your thinking while experiencing disagreement as a threat. You can want to develop future leaders while unconsciously reinforcing your position as the only person capable of making the most difficult decisions.
Sometimes the problem persists not because you fail to understand it, but because part of your internal system still has a reason to maintain it.
And until that reason is explored, another leadership workshop may simply teach you how to manage the same reaction more effectively. Which is not necessarily the same as changing it.
What I look for beneath the behaviour
In my work with leaders and leadership teams, I am interested not only in helping leaders behave differently, but also in understanding why changing those behaviours can remain so difficult, even when they know exactly what to do.
If someone tells me they need to delegate more, I rarely begin by explaining how delegation works. Most experienced managers already understand the concept.
I want to know what happens inside them at the precise moment they are supposed to let go. What do they experience when someone makes a decision without consulting them? What does another person's mistake mean to them? What feels threatened when their opinion is challenged? What happens to their sense of value when they are no longer the person everyone needs?
And what might they have learned, perhaps long before becoming a leader, about control, responsibility, trust, or the consequences of relying on others?
These questions are not about turning a business conversation into endless introspection. They are about discovering the internal logic that makes a behaviour persist.
Once we identify that logic, the work can move beyond simply discussing what needs to change. I combine strategic coaching and systemic work with transformational approaches that explore the beliefs, emotional responses, and automatic patterns sustaining certain behaviours. Depending on the person and the situation, this may involve working beyond intellectual understanding, with the aim of helping them experience and respond to familiar triggers differently.
The goal is not to make someone better at controlling an old reaction. It is to change, where possible, the conditions that keep producing it.
Imagine two leaders who have both learned to delegate. The first delegates a decision but spends the following week resisting the temptation to intervene. Every disagreement requires self-control. Every mistake triggers frustration that must be consciously managed.
The second gradually becomes more comfortable allowing others to decide, including when they would have approached the situation differently.
From the outside, both may appear to be delegating. But internally, they are having very different experiences. One is continually managing an old response. The other may be developing a genuinely different one. And that difference matters because leadership behaviours rarely remain individual for long.
Your team may be trapped in a system you created together
Sometimes, the problem no longer belongs to one person. It has become a relationship. Consider a controlling leader and an increasingly passive team. The leader intervenes because the team appears incapable of acting independently. The team becomes more cautious because the leader keeps intervening. That caution confirms the leader's belief that people lack initiative, so the leader takes even more control.
Eventually, everyone has evidence that seems to justify their behaviour. The leader says, "If I don't step in, nothing moves."
The team says, "Why take responsibility when the decision will be changed anyway?" Nobody believes they are creating the problem. Everyone is helping to maintain it.
What if your team isn't failing to take ownership, but has become exceptionally good at giving ownership back to you? This is why I find it particularly valuable to work with both leaders and their leadership teams.
When a pattern has become embedded in the way a team functions, individual transformation may need to be accompanied by changes in how people interact, make decisions, and hold one another accountable. A leader can genuinely begin to delegate while the team continues seeking reassurance because that is what its members have learned to do.
The leader interprets those requests as evidence that nothing has changed. The team interprets the leader's frustration as confirmation that independence remains unsafe.
And the old dynamic begins rebuilding itself. Changing the system requires both sides to recognise their contribution. The leader must learn to release control. The team must learn to exercise responsibility. Both must stop waiting for the other to change first.
This does not excuse poor performance or eliminate individual accountability. It recognises something more fundamental. Some leadership problems cannot be sustainably resolved by treating individuals in isolation from the system in which their behaviour occurs.
5 questions to ask before blaming your team
If you want to explore whether your leadership may be contributing to the difficulties you experience, begin with five questions. Not as a personality test or leadership scorecard, but as an opportunity to observe what actually happens around you.
1. Have I made myself indispensable to decisions I should no longer own? Look at the decisions that regularly reach your desk. How many genuinely require your authority, and how many arrive because your team has learned that you will eventually want to be involved?
When someone makes a reasonable decision without you, can you accept an approach different from your own, or do you feel compelled to improve it?
Try this. For one week, identify a category of decisions that should belong entirely to someone else. Make the boundaries explicit, then observe not only what the person does, but also what happens inside you when you are no longer in control.
2. What does disagreeing with me actually cost? You may sincerely believe that you welcome challenge. But what happens in the seconds after someone questions your opinion? Do you become curious, or do you immediately begin constructing your defence?
Does the discussion remain genuinely open, or does the room quickly understand which conclusion you prefer?
Try this. At your next leadership meeting, invite someone to challenge an important assumption. Ask them to develop their reasoning before responding. Notice what you feel compelled to defend, and why.
3. Am I developing leaders or people who have become experts at pleasing me? Think about who gets recognised, promoted, and trusted. Are they the people who make the strongest independent contributions, or those who most consistently deliver what you expected?
When someone takes a thoughtful risk that fails, do you recognise the quality of the reasoning or focus exclusively on the disappointing result?
Try this. Review your last three significant disagreements with team members. What happened afterward? Were their ideas genuinely considered? Did those conversations change the way you viewed or trusted them?
4. Which of my greatest strengths becomes destructive under pressure? Perhaps you are exceptionally decisive, until urgency makes you dismissive. Perhaps your standards are extraordinary, until perfectionism makes everyone afraid to experiment.
Perhaps you are deeply committed, until your inability to disconnect creates an unspoken expectation that everyone else should be equally available.
Try this. Choose one strength you are particularly proud of. Ask a trusted colleague when that strength becomes excessive and what impact it has on others. The answer may reveal something you have never considered a weakness.
5. What does my team know about me that I am the last person to hear? What have people learned about your reactions, preferences, blind spots, and emotional triggers that they discuss with each other but hesitate to say directly to you?
Consider asking:
"What do you find yourself adapting to in my leadership that I may not be aware of?"
Then listen. Do not interrupt, justify, explain the context, or immediately correct their interpretation. .If nobody answers, do not assume there is nothing to say. Ask yourself whether you have created the conditions in which an honest answer would feel safe. If necessary, use a confidential feedback process. Because sometimes the most valuable leadership feedback is precisely the feedback your position makes it difficult for others to give you.
Stop fixing the symptoms while preserving the cause
There is nothing wrong with expecting accountability, strong performance, and initiative from your team. Leadership sometimes requires difficult conversations, clearer standards, better recruitment decisions, and decisive action.
But there is a difference between holding people accountable and assuming that the source of a problem must always lie with them.
One of the most costly mistakes a leader can make is to keep changing people, processes, or organisational structures while leaving untouched the patterns that helped produce the difficulty.
New hires arrive with fresh energy, then gradually become cautious. A reorganisation creates temporary momentum before familiar tensions return. A leadership programme gives everyone a new vocabulary, but months later, the same frustrations dominate meetings.
The organisation appears to change. The underlying dynamics remain remarkably stable. At some point, it becomes worth asking whether another initiative will genuinely solve the problem or simply reorganise the conditions in which it continues to exist.
This is not about blame. It is about responsibility. And responsibility becomes particularly powerful when leaders examine not only what they intended to create, but also what their behaviour has actually produced.
A leader who recognises that their urgency creates hesitation, their perfectionism suppresses experimentation, or their need to feel indispensable limits others has identified something worth changing. The next step is to do something different with that awareness.
The question that could change everything
The next time you find yourself complaining about your team, pay attention to the story you are telling. Are they genuinely incapable of making decisions, or have they learned that you prefer making them yourself? Do they lack courage, or have they learned that disagreeing with you comes at a price? Are they insufficiently committed, or have your expectations made sustainable commitment almost impossible?
And if everyone seems to depend on you, is that entirely their choice? These questions may not produce comfortable answers. They may challenge parts of your identity that have been central to your success. But discomfort can be useful when it prompts you to question a long-standing assumption.
The aim of leadership is not to remain the most capable person in the room. It is to create the conditions in which other people become more capable, more independent, and more effective because of your presence, not permanently dependent on it.
So before asking what is wrong with your team, ask yourself one more question:
"What if they are not showing me their limitations, but the limitations of the leadership environment I've created?"
Your team may not need a different leader. It may need you to lead differently.
Ready to change the pattern?
If you recognised yourself in this article, choose one recurring frustration and examine what your own responses might be reinforcing. Change one interaction. Observe what becomes possible.
But if you are a leader who has already done the work, understands the patterns, and still finds yourself repeating them, perhaps the next step isn't more insight.
It's a different level of transformation. That's where deeper transformation becomes possible. It involves uncovering the invisible mechanisms beneath visible behaviours, moving beyond managing old reactions, and creating changes that can reshape both individual leadership and collective performance.
If you're ready to move beyond understanding your patterns and start transforming what they produce, let's connect.
Because the real measure of transformation isn't what you now understand about yourself. It's what no longer needs to repeat itself around you.
Read more from Anne Rigaud-Walker
Anne Rigaud-Walker, Executive Coach & Transformation Strategist
Anne Rigaud-Walker is an Executive Coach and Strategic Transformation Practitioner who works with senior leaders, leadership teams and high-performing individuals. Drawing on a corporate background and a broad range of coaching, psychology and neuroscience-informed approaches, she helps uncover the invisible patterns that continue to shape behaviour and performance. Her work is particularly suited to leaders who have already done significant work on themselves yet still encounter recurring limitations or blind spots. She is currently exploring how leadership, human capacity and organisational performance can evolve towards more regenerative models.
