Leadership
Most Leaders Aren’t the Problem
“When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.”
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
I spend most of my days talking with leaders from startups, enterprises, and academia who think hard about teams and the humans in them.
I also talk with the teams themselves, and I’ve noticed a gap between how I experience leaders and how their teams experience them. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but most leaders aren’t bad people. Some are better matched than others to their business goals, their company’s stage, or their people. But a truly bad leader is far rarer than our conversations about leadership suggest.
The Leader as Lightning Rod
When pressure builds in a system, the group looks for somewhere to put it, and the leader is the most visible place. Wilfred Bion, the psychoanalyst whose work still shapes how we understand team dynamics, observed that anxious groups often act as if one person should rescue them, and when that person inevitably can’t, the group turns its frustration toward them. The leader becomes a lightning rod. That is not a moral failing of the team. It is how groups manage discomfort.
Organizational researchers have a name for the broader pattern. James Meindl and his colleagues called it the romance of leadership, our tendency to credit leaders for organizational outcomes and overlook the many other forces at play. We over-credit the person at the top when things go well and over-blame them when they don’t, because a single person is easier to understand than a system.
Bad Behavior Isn’t the Same as a Bad Leader
None of this means leaders get a pass. They hold positional power and with it real responsibility. But the data on genuinely destructive leaders tells a quieter story than the headlines. Narcissistic personality disorder appears in a small minority of the population, and while narcissistic traits are somewhat overrepresented at the top, a large meta-analysis by Emily Grijalva and colleagues found that narcissism predicts who emerges as a leader far more than who leads well. The toxic boss is real but uncommon.
And leaders are human, which means they have bad days and bad habits. I’ve watched myself fall into patterns under pressure that I’d coach any client out of in a heartbeat. What I’ve come to believe, as a psychologist and as a CEO, is that people don’t keep doing things that serve no function. A behavior either makes sense in the current context or made sense at some point and is still running. If you want to understand a leader’s behavior, you have to look at the system it lives in.
Everyone Has a Hand in It
Everyone shapes how a group functions. Roles get distributed, often without anyone choosing them. Someone becomes the voice of caution, someone the peacemaker, someone the one who says what everyone else is thinking. The leader’s role is powerful, but it is still one role inside a pattern the whole team keeps alive. When we locate the entire problem in one person, we lose sight of the parts we can actually change.
To Be Sure
Some leaders do cause real harm, and naming that matters. Toxic behavior, abuse of power, and serious ruptures of trust are not group dynamics to be explained away. The point is not that leaders are blameless. It is that blame placed entirely on one person rarely fixes a team, and it often lets the rest of the system off the hook.
Something to Try
The next time you notice your team pinning a problem on the leader, or you feel a friction point building, pause and start by naming what is happening in the room. You can name the feeling or simply describe the behavior you see. It might sound like, “I notice we got quiet when the timeline came up, and I’m wondering if there’s some frustration we haven’t said out loud.”
Then ask yourself four questions:
How am I contributing to this?
How is the leader contributing?
How are other individuals contributing?
How is the team as a whole creating and sustaining this pattern?
From there, ask what you can change. It is hard for one person to change a whole system, but individuals have more impact than they think. It’s a bit like dancing with someone. You can’t force your partner to change their moves, but you can change yours and see how the dance shifts.
The Groops Take
Before every Groops engagement kicks off, someone asks whether the leader should be in the group. Our answer is almost always yes. If the leader works with the team regularly, the leader is part of the dynamics, and the dynamics are what we are trying to improve. Taking them out of the room means working on a version of the team that doesn’t exist. In rare cases, where there has been a significant rupture or genuinely toxic behavior, we stage the leader’s participation over time. But the default reflects what our work keeps showing us, which is that alignment and performance are built by the whole system, leader included.
What’s New at Groops
Our new website is live at joingroops.com, with the podcast and newsletter pages coming soon, and we would love to hear what you think.
We have also launched the Groops Team Intelligence System, which pairs live human coaching with an AI coach. Your team takes our assessment, and every member receives private one-on-one coaching to use at their discretion. The team receives six custom coaching sessions built around its results, plus an AI coach that knows your team and helps you work better together between live sessions. We are inviting a small group of organizations to join as founding design partners, who receive a discount and help shape how the system evolves. We are bringing partners on in cohorts, and pricing increases with each one, so joining sooner means a better rate. If that sounds like a fit, email me at bobbi.w@joingroops.com.
References
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock.
Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D. A., Gaddis, B. H., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships. Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1–47.
Lewin, K. (1936). Principles of topological psychology. McGraw-Hill.
Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78–102.
