Stop fighting the behaviour. Start seeing the story.
When nobody owns the problem, who’s fault is that? We argued both sides to find out.
This article is a collaboration between Luca Foppoli of The Intentional Manager and Elina of Leadership Capability System. We wanted to take a pattern most managers will recognise and argue opposite sides, before looking for a way through.
Luca writes for those who have been sucked dry by corporate, providing deep thoughts regarding leadership, execution and strategy as an antidote.
Elina writes for managers stuck between knowing and doing. Leadership Capability System publication breaks leadership down to the practice level, one capability at a time.
The story
It’s Thursday, 6.15pm. Marta’s eyes feel sandy and her head is throbbing. Teams beeps, it’s Bruno, again asking for help on a case she expected him to close on his own. A doctor wants two more sub-analyses. Each will cost weeks and a slice of the budget while adding little, so the answer should be an easy no. Marta, who has run Medical Affairs for fifteen years, feels her patience thin: why can’t he just make the call?
Bruno remembers why. A month ago he made exactly this call, told the doctor the data was enough and closed the file; Marta reopened it the following week and approved one of the analyses after all. He felt humiliated in front of the customer and decided that if Marta wanted to do his job, so be it. So he brings her in.
Now they sit in a meeting that neither of them wanted, deciding together something that one of them should have decided alone. She thinks the team has stopped owning its decisions. He thinks he is not allowed to make them.
Who is right?
Manager’s view: it’s the team’s problem
“I do not have the f*ing time! This should be on him, else what did I even hire him for!?”. Marta is tired and she feels stretched too thin. She just doesn’t have the time to deal with this, but also knows that, now that Bruno has asked for help, either she provides it or the project will just stall. This always happens: her people don’t have the guts to make decisions and she needs to step in to get things moving.
When she thinks more coolly about this, she also realizes that the best decisions are made by the person who is closest to the problem; in this case, Bruno. She can help and support and her superior experience would allow her to quickly close the gap in knowledge, but it doesn’t change the fact that Bruno was the one in front of the customer, not her, and no amount of experience fills that gap. She knows that, as a manager, one of her main roles should be to enable her team to make better decisions and she promises herself that she will spend more time on context-setting with Bruno.
Finally, leaving this to Bruno feels, identity-wise, right. She attended an inspiring course on leadership and reflected on her role as team coach: if you elevate the team, their output will multiply and engagement will go up. This is the kind of manager she wants to be and the decision should sit with Bruno.
The weight of this problem sits with the team: they are grown-up professionals and should act as such. She is a manager, not a babysitter, and needs to see that the team can stand on their own feet when push comes to shove.
Team’s view: it’s the manager’s problem
Bruno’s story was written the moment Marta reopened the file he had closed. And it was not just an overridden decision, it was a signal: “your opinion doesn’t matter”. What’s more important is that the situation exposed a real risk for Bruno, his status and credibility were compromised, it was a humiliation in front of the client.
The risk of not guessing the boss’s judgement correctly becomes too high.
So Bruno has options: seek conflict openly, which brings even more risk, or adapt quietly. He chooses to adapt in order to protect relationships, reduce exposure and protect himself from public correction. And, until something changes in Marta’s management style, his strategy of deferring decisions to her is a safer bet.
The weight of this problem sits with the manager: and not only because she has formal authority. Marta created the conditions Bruno is responding to. Her frustration is real, but it is directed at the symptom (Bruno’s withdrawal from decision-making) while the real cause is a pattern she owns and cannot yet see.
Both are right. Neither can fix it alone.
Marta thinks Bruno has an ownership problem. Bruno thinks Marta has a management problem.
Each of them is describing the situation accurately, but from inside their own story - and they are unaware of the gap.
We do not experience situations directly. We experience them through our operating model shaped by personality traits, patterns, and previous experiences. Add to this the organizational context and hierarchical nature of a corporation and things get even harder to untangle. Authority changes what your position costs you if you get it wrong.
How can this self-reinforcing loop be broken? Better communication? The likelihood that another conversation will break the loop is thin, until at least one of them is ready to make one critical move.
And this move is a shift in what you see.
We naturally see the world from our own perspective: we are the hero of our own story. What if, for a moment, we could imagine the story where the other person is the hero, not a supporting character in ours?
What if Marta could hold Bruno’s story for a moment without needing to agree with it? She might see a person who learned, from direct experience, that his judgement gets overridden and who adapted to protect himself from another situation he found humiliating.
What if Bruno could hold Marta’s story? A manager stretched too thin who is not trying to humiliate him, but to move faster.
They would be more likely to shift from blame to empathy and from there move toward a genuine solution that not only fixes the practical problem, but strengthens the relationship and trust.
The loop persists because both sides are stuck inside their own story, constantly seeking the clues to reconfirm it.
Breaking it means making what is currently invisible visible - the frustration, the stories - into a shared space, while keeping it safe for both parties. It requires something from whoever moves first: enough self-awareness to see beyond their own position, enough courage to take a step into the unknown and enough skill to open the conversation without destroying the trust that made it possible in the first place.
And in breaking the loop lies freedom.
If this resonated, the next step is practice. The skill this article is about is seeing beyond your own story to influence what happens next; it is something that takes deliberate practice. I have put together a Capability Practice Guide on influencing stakeholders, taking you through Notice, Experiment, and Integrate. Free for subscribers, instant download. 👉 Free Practice Guide: Influencing Stakeholders
 | A guest post by
|
Behavior makes more sense when you understand the story behind it.