Nine months into my first official leadership role, I got devastating feedback from my lead: evidently my team members and peer leads said I was defensive and intimidating and the one I’ll never forget— “responded to their input with thinly veiled contempt.”

I was flabbergasted, angry and confused. Most of all, I felt betrayed. I was killing myself in this job. I had only been in the role for nine months, and I was mentoring three new leads. When I started in this position, the goals for the department were unclear, and we had a reputation for being toxic. And now I was being told that I was the problem?

Once I calmed down, I saw it was more complicated than that: I was part of a system that wasn’t working. Once I shifted my perspective, I found the leverage to make changes.

Leadership is lonely

A big part of why this job (and maybe your job) was so stressful is that I believed I had to carry the burden alone. I knew I was there to support my team and help them succeed—but I didn’t have the luxury of leaning on my lead the same way.

There was also the problem of being squeezed between two perspectives. My team members had a very different view on what was keeping us stuck than the head of the department did. I could see both of their perspectives and had some ideas about how they could fit in the full pattern, but creating an environment where all those perspectives could be used to form a shared direction, is both challenging and invisible work.

When the solution is the problem

Instead of looking for ways to make my work visible and help everyone work on the systems level together, I tried to fix it on my own. I took on as much of the work myself as possible and tried to eliminate all the factors I couldn’t control—like other people’s feelings and ideas. I thought I could maybe keep the boat afloat and get us to where we needed to go if everyone else sat perfectly still.

You will be shocked to find out that did not work.

What I’ve learned since then is when you work in human systems, emotional input and alternate perspectives don’t go away when they are dismissed or suppressed. They turn into a kind of poison that infects the system. So instead of removing those factors, you introduce messier and more entrenched versions of them.

You are part of the system

It was bad enough that I’d created an environment where other people’s emotions were quietly wreaking havoc. I had also cast myself as the long-suffering hero—sacrificing everything for the good of the cause.

That story had consequences.

Because I believed it was my job to save the day, I was deeply resentful that no one seemed grateful. Instead of appreciation, I felt resistance. No matter how much I did or how hard I worked, people kept bringing up concerns that didn’t fit into my plan. Couldn’t they see I was already stretched thin trying to make this work?

What I was missing was this: I wasn’t solely responsible for our success.

And when I believed I was, I also believed I needed all the power to make things work. So, slowly and unintentionally, I took it—making more decisions myself, taking on more of the work, and redoing other people’s contributions. Eventually there was no room for other people’s ideas, emotions, and initiative.

My intentions were good—but the impact was destructive. Team members and peer leads became less engaged. They stopped taking initiative, which of course reinforced my story that I couldn’t rely on anyone else.

At the same time, trust eroded in the other direction too. People began working and talking in spaces where I wasn’t present, forming their own stories about my behavior and my motives. From their perspective, I wasn’t a hero—I was controlling, defensive, and hard to approach.

Repairing struggling systems

My saving grace was I’d built a habit of regularly telling my team members and peer leads that if there was feedback they didn’t feel comfortable giving me directly, I welcomed them talking about it to my lead. Eventually they did. Which resulted in the devastating feedback we started with.

It also was the catalyst for beginning the system’s repair.

The first step was to recalibrate my internal systems. I started working with a coach who helped me create a space to fully acknowledge my emotions, honor my very real effort and good intentions, and separate what I meant to do from the impact I was actually having.

That distance allowed me to see how I was contributing to the system I was so frustrated by.

Then came the repair.

First, the apologies. Because I had a place to process and validate my own feelings, I was able to genuinely validate the feelings of others—without defending myself or explaining them away.

That’s when I realized something crucial: emotions weren’t the problem. Human systems require emotions to function. In fact, the system breaks down when we try to suppress or ignore them. That’s what causes them to morph from helpful messengers into weapons.

Luckily, the process is reversible. Once I declared a truce and stopped weaponizing my emotions and protecting myself from the emotions of others, the rest of the team followed suit. We stopped spending our energy defending ourselves from each other and started working together on the actual problems in front of us.

It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened faster than I expected. In our case, no one in the system had bad intentions, and we all cared deeply about the outcomes. Once we paused long enough to see what was really happening, it became easier to realize we were all on the same team.

How to start

If you’re leading a team that feels stuck, disengaged, or quietly resistant, repair has to start with you. The good news is you don’t have to hit a breaking point before you begin.

Start with internal work.

Understanding what you’re feeling, the story those feelings are feeding, and how that story shapes your behavior—especially under pressure—is the fastest way to pinpoint how you are contributing to the very outcomes you want to avoid.

That step can be hard to do on your own, so I’ve created two self-coaching tools to help you regulate your emotions enough to move through the process. You can download them from my self coaching resource page.

When you feel responsible for everything, frustrated with everyone, and unsure how to change the pattern without making things worse, it helps you slow down, identify what’s happening internally, notice the story you are telling yourself, and pick a new, more helpful, view of the situation.

You don’t have to carry this alone. And you don’t have to be perfect to start making things better. If you’d like to work with a partner on untangling your own situation, schedule a free consultation to discover if I can help. 

If you want early access to new tools, reflections, and coaching opportunities, you can also join my email list below.