The offsite did it’s job, but the change didn’t stick.
Early in my career, I was part of a leadership team going through a messy transition. A new president had arrived with his entire inner circle — direct, loud, East Coast energy. The existing team was deeply Midwestern, communicating mostly in what wasn’t said.
Nobody brought them together with intention. The clash was immediate.
I partnered with a mentor to design an intervention unlike any I’d seen. We devoted an entire day to trust, relationships, and psychological safety before a single strategic priority was discussed. By the end, the team wasn’t healed, but they were building something. They had language for what had been unspoken. They had a foundation.
I thought we’d cracked it.
Six months later, the same patterns were back. The silos. The avoidance. The subtle undermining. The team couldn’t fully leverage the work we’d done together. I kept asking myself what went wrong.
It took me a while to see it.
There were individual leadership behaviors quietly eroding trust that no offsite could reach: A leader’s need for control. Another’s conflict avoidance. A third who kept information close because that’s how they’d always operated.
The team work had been real. But those individual patterns reasserted themselves … because we never addressed them.
The understanding of what happened is what informed everything I now build my work around:
Team dynamics and individual leadership can’t be fixed sequentially. They have to be addressed together, in parallel, with intention.
You can build trust at the team level. But if individual leaders haven’t examined their own defaults — the behaviors that got them here but now collide at scale — those defaults will reassert. Every time.
And you can coach individual leaders to greater self-awareness. But if the team doesn’t have the shared language, norms, and trust to put that awareness into practice together, it stays theoretical.
You have to work both the collective and the individual. That’s the work.
Looking to increase the cohesion, trust, and impact of your leadership team? Reach out and let’s discuss The Compass Team Experience and how I can help.
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