Companies sometimes bring me in with the mandate: “fix my teams”. Other times it’s not said quite that directly, but the message is clear. Leadership has decided that something is wrong with the people doing the work, and I’ve been hired to correct it.
The teams know this. They always know.
They may not have been told explicitly, but they can read the situation. An external coach has appeared. Leadership is watching. The implicit message has already been delivered: you are doing something wrong, and someone has been brought in to fix you.
This is the worst possible starting condition for a coaching engagement, and it’s almost completely wrong. The team is almost never broken. They’re almost never doing anything explicitly wrong. They have adapted to an existing broken system and are doing the best they can in that context.
What does “almost never” mean? I can think of 1 or 2 teams that were legitimately broken, out of the many hundreds of teams I’ve worked with. In the most notable case, it was the team itself that had demanded a coach be brought in, over the objections of management, and that was a fascinating situation. It’s so rare that a team is broken, that it’s not worth seriously considering. Most teams are doing the best they can in a bad situation.
The threat that arrives before I do
When people perceive that their autonomy is being removed, the amygdala (entry point to our survival mechanism) reads it as a threat. That threat triggers reactance, which can be strong enough to sabotage even conscious efforts to engage and comply. I’ve written about this in more detail in Autonomy, but the short version is: telling people what to do, even when they consciously agree with it, can activate a resistance mechanism that works below the level of rational thought.
In most coaching engagements, this is a problem I need to manage carefully. In a “fix my teams” engagement, the threat has already been delivered before I arrive. The amygdala response is already running. I’m walking into a room full of people whose survival mechanisms have been activated by the organization that hired me.
The resistance I encounter in these engagements isn’t a team problem. It’s a predictable response to how the engagement was framed.
What I actually find
In the vast majority of cases, the teams are not broken. They are not doing anything fundamentally wrong. They are usually working reasonably sensibly within the constraints they’ve been given, responding rationally to the incentives in front of them.
What looks like dysfunction from the outside is usually a team that has adapted to a broken environment. The team isn’t the problem. The environment is the problem.
This matters because coaching a team to behave differently inside a broken environment is at best a short-term patch. There is still value in developing new skills and giving the team more options, understanding that they’re still constrained by the system around them.
The reset
When I walk into these engagements, the first thing I need to do is defuse the threat. I do this by being explicit about why I’m actually there. My opening is usually some version of:
“I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to give you more options and more skill so that you can make better choices for yourselves.”
At this point, I can often see a visible relaxation in the room. People who came in braced for a fight, settle slightly. The dynamic shifts.
That relaxation isn’t relief that I seem like a nice person. It’s the nervous system standing down from a threat it was already preparing for. It’s measurable, and it tells me exactly what they were expecting before I opened my mouth.
From that point, we can have a real conversation. Before it, we couldn’t.
What this means if you’re bringing in outside help
How you introduce coaching (the framing, the mandate, the internal communications) determines the starting conditions for the entire engagement. A poorly framed introduction doesn’t just create an awkward first meeting. It activates a threat response that the coach will spend the first weeks trying to undo, if they can undo it at all.
This is worth thinking about before the announcement goes out, not after. In fact, it’s one of the most valuable things a coach can help with: how the engagement is framed to the teams shapes everything that follows. If you’re considering bringing in outside help, that conversation is worth having early.
The way an engagement is introduced is itself an intervention. Make it deliberately.
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