The agency crisis is an organisational pattern where university teams are unable to turn strategy into action because institutional culture prefers certainty, central approvals, and complex planning before people feel able to act. Overcoming this requires shifting from top-down control to collective agency, that’s built on psychological safety, individual confidence, and space to experiment.

On this page

• What do we mean by agency?
• Agency is powerful when people act together
• Creating the conditions for agency
• Collective agency in practice
• From ideas to action: practical tools for creating agency
• Rethinking leadership in Higher Education

Spend any amount of time working in Higher Education right now and you’ll hear the same pressures being discussed: financial constraints, changing student numbers and expectations, technological disruption, AI, increasing complexity and the continuing challenge of doing more with less.

There is no shortage of analysis. There are strategies, reviews, consultations, transformation programmes and plans.

And yet, despite all that activity, progress on change can feel remarkably slow.

This isn’t because people don’t see the problems, or because they don’t care about them. More often, it seems to be a consequence of the way universities respond to uncertainty.

When something important needs to change, the instinct is to make the uncertainty safer by adding more structure around it: understand the problem more fully, get alignment, develop the business case, secure sponsors, agree the plan, establish the project and then, eventually, start doing something.

All of those things can be sensible. The difficulty comes when they become prerequisites for action.

In a complex environment, the information you need to decide what to do next often doesn’t exist until you start doing something.

That can leave HE organisations caught in a strange loop: the more uncertain the situation becomes, the more certainty they try to create before acting, even though the action itself may be what generates the information they need.

This is one reason we’ve become increasingly interested in agency in HE: not as another leadership competency, but as a way of understanding what helps people move from seeing a problem to doing something about it.

If this feels familiar, three pieces from our work explore different parts of the problem:

• Why agency is evaporating and what to do about it – looks at what happens when people gradually lose the sense that they can influence what happens around them, and why that can become a systemic problem rather than an individual one.
• Why waiting for certainty keeps change stuck in HE – explores the tendency for people to wait until they feel sufficiently certain, confident or prepared before taking the first step, even when taking that step is what would give them the information they need.
• The fallacy of planning – looks at what can happen when the attempt to create a better plan starts to displace the conversations and experiments that might actually help you understand what needs to happen.

The rest of this guide brings these ideas together, and explores what it might take to create the conditions for more people to act.

What do we mean by agency?

Agency is the capacity to act: to use your judgement, make decisions and do something about the situation you’re in.

It sounds straightforward, but in practice agency is more complex than simply giving people more autonomy.

People often think about agency as though it is something an individual possesses. Someone is confident, capable and willing to take responsibility, so we say they have agency. Someone else is cautious, uncertain or waiting for permission, and we might conclude that they lack it.

But agency isn’t simply something that people possess.

It is shaped by context.

You might be highly confident and capable within your own team, but become much more uncertain when working across a faculty boundary. You might have considerable expertise, but be cautious when the hierarchy around you is particularly pronounced.

The person hasn’t changed.

The context has.

That matters because if you want more agency in your organisation, empowering people isn’t going to be enough. You need to look at the conditions in which people are being asked to act, as well as to the confidence and capability of the people themselves.

In our experience, three conditions seem particularly important:

Safety

Feeling able to speak openly and honestly about what you think and feel, including being able to admit mistakes, ask questions and disagree with authority, especially when it is inconvenient or challenges the prevailing view.

Confidence

Believing that you have something useful to contribute, that your contribution is valued and that you can exercise judgement without letting self-doubt stop you.

Agency

Having enough clarity, authority and room to make choices and act on what you know, rather than constantly waiting for someone else to tell you what to do.

These aren’t three independent ingredients. They interact with one another.

If people don’t feel safe, they may not speak up. If they don’t have confidence, they may defer to someone else even when they have something valuable to add. And if they have neither the authority nor the opportunity to act, safety and confidence don’t get very far.

But agency is more than an individual capability.

It isn’t just something that happens inside a person.

It is shaped by the environment and by what happens between people too: relationships, power, organisational structures and the opportunities people have to act.

And that takes us somewhere slightly different.

Agency is powerful when people act together

Agency is contextual. It is also relational.

Agency is contextual

An individual can have agency in one context and very little in another.

What anyone can do depends partly on who they are working with, the relationships they have, the information available to them, the authority they can draw on and the purpose they are working towards.

This matters particularly in universities because many of the problems that need solving don’t sit neatly within one team or one part of the organisation.

A problem might involve academic colleagues, professional services, different schools and faculties, IT, students and external partners. No one person has all the information, expertise, relationships or authority needed to solve it.

Yet the response can still be to look for someone who does.

And without agency, the organisational response to challenges can be to push the problem upwards ie someone senior needs to make the decision. Someone needs to bring the different stakeholder groups together. Someone needs to sponsor the work. Someone needs to approve it.

Sometimes that’s exactly what is needed. Formal authority matters, and there are decisions that should sit with people who have the responsibility for making them.

But if looking upwards becomes the default response to challenges, people gradually learn that the way to get things done is to find someone with more authority.

That creates dependency.

An alternative is to build the capacity to act together.

Agency is relational

Universities are highly networked organisations, but that doesn’t mean people necessarily know how to use those networks, or feel able to.

There are siloes, competing priorities and boundaries between schools, faculties and professional services can make collaboration difficult, particularly when there is no obvious person whose job it is to bring everyone together or very different understandings of the same problem.

Being able to build relationships, influence others, find shared purpose and bring people together around a problem is not just a useful leadership skill. It is part of an organisation’s capacity to change.

Agency is collective

Collective agency takes this one step further.

People can do things together that none of them could do alone.

Some people bring knowledge of the problem. Others bring technical expertise. Someone has the relationship that opens a door. Someone else has enough influence to bring another group into the conversation.

The power to act doesn’t necessarily sit with any one individual. It can emerge from the connections between them.

But collective agency doesn’t replace individual agency. It extends it.

Collective agency depends on people being willing and able to contribute what they know, exercise their judgement and take some responsibility for what happens next.

We believe this is where coalition building becomes important. A coalition doesn’t require everyone to agree about everything. It needs enough shared purpose for people with different perspectives, expertise and connections to contribute to something that matters to them.

We’ve developed a practical Building Coalitions toolkit that explores some of the mechanics of doing this: what’s needed for a coalition to operate, what to think about when planning them, the various stages and tools you can use to design and prototype solutions, and allow work to move.

We’re developing further thinking about collaborative leadership and collective agency, which we’ll add here as that work develops.

But relationships alone aren’t enough.

People also need to feel able to contribute, challenge what they see and act on what they know.

Creating the conditions for agency

If agency is contextual, relational and collective, what makes it more likely to emerge?

There isn’t a single answer, but three conditions come up repeatedly in our work: people need to feel safe enough to contribute honestly, confident enough to believe their contribution has value, and have enough room to act on what they know.

These conditions are connected, but they are not interchangeable. Someone can feel psychologically safe but have very little scope to act. Someone can have considerable authority but lack the confidence to use it. And a team can have capable, confident people who still struggle to make progress because decisions are concentrated elsewhere.

It is worth looking at each in turn.

i. Psychological safety: can people speak up?

Universities depend heavily on professional knowledge and expertise, yet hierarchy can make it surprisingly difficult for people to say what they actually think.

People may see a problem but decide it isn’t theirs to raise. They may have an idea but assume someone more senior will know better. They may recognise that something isn’t working but stay quiet because previous attempts to challenge the status quo haven’t gone well.

This isn’t necessarily about a lack of courage or commitment.

People learn from the environments around them.

If speaking up tends to result in being dismissed, ignored or labelled as difficult, people will quite reasonably become more cautious about speaking up. And if that happens often enough, the organisation loses access to information it already has.

Psychological safety isn’t about making work comfortable or avoiding disagreement. In practice it is about creating the conditions in which people can ask questions, suggest ideas, challenge, contribute and surface inconvenient information without fearing that doing so will leave them feeling humiliated, rejected or damage their position.

That matters because the information people are least comfortable sharing can sometimes be the information an organisation most needs to hear.

It also has a direct bearing on institutional speed. Problems that are identified early are usually easier to deal with than problems that have been allowed to become embedded, and organisations that can discuss mistakes and what isn’t working are better placed to learn and adapt.

If this is something you’re exploring, these articles look at different aspects of the relationship between safety, challenge and change:

• Why psychological safety is the hidden superpower for organisational change explores why psychological safety matters when organisations need people to speak honestly, challenge assumptions and adapt.
• The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back looks at what happens when difficult conversations are avoided, and how that can leave problems unresolved.
• Trauma-informed leadership in HE: a different way to understand resistance to change is another lens on what may be happening when people find change difficult, rather than treating resistance simply as something to overcome.

ii. Confidence: do people believe they can contribute?

Feeling safe enough to speak is one thing. Believing that what you have to say is worth hearing is another.

Confidence is less about having all the answers and more about having enough self-belief to trust yourself. This affects whether people put forward an idea, offer a different perspective, take a position or step up for something they haven’t done before.

It can be surprisingly fragile in organisations where expertise and authority are strongly associated with hierarchy.

If people’s ideas are routinely dismissed, belittled or simply not listened to by someone senior, they can start to doubt their own judgement. If people are repeatedly criticised when they get something wrong, they may become more cautious about putting themselves forward. And if the safest response is simply to do what has been asked without questioning it, people have fewer opportunities to develop the confidence that comes from exercising their own judgement.

This isn’t about blaming leaders for undermining confidence, or suggesting that people simply need to be more confident. These patterns can emerge gradually, often without anyone intending them to.

Confidence is shaped by experience.

When people have opportunities to contribute, to try things, to get useful feedback and to see that their contribution has made a difference, they have the opportunity to build a more grounded sense of their own capability. Positive feedback matters, not as reassurance for its own sake, but because it gives people evidence that their judgement and contribution have value.

Sometimes that means helping less.

Instead of immediately providing the answer, ask what someone thinks. Instead of taking responsibility for a problem, ask what they think should happen. And when someone does something well, be specific about what you noticed and why it was useful. That kind of feedback can help people recognise their own strengths and become more confident in exercising their judgement.

The aim isn’t to leave people to work things out for themselves. It is to give them enough support and enough room to discover, through experience, that they are capable of more than they may have assumed.

Confidence doesn’t mean feeling certain.

In fact, some of the most useful confidence is the confidence to act while still knowing that you might get something wrong, and to remain open to what you can learn from what happens next.

If you’re interested in how this plays out in leadership and development, these pieces explore some of our thinking:

• Leadership is already in your teams looks at the leadership capability that already exists within teams, and what happens when institutions create more opportunities for that capability to be exercised.
• What if helping less is how you develop your team more? explores the slightly counterintuitive idea that leaders can develop people more effectively by resisting the temptation to solve their problems for them.
• The gap at the heart of leadership development in higher education considers the wider question of how leadership capability develops, and whether taking people away from the work is always the best way to help them become better at leading.

iii. Agency: can people actually act?

Safety and confidence matter, but neither is enough if people still can’t act.

You can have a team that feels able to speak honestly, and individuals who have confidence in their own judgement, but still find that very little happens because decisions are concentrated elsewhere, responsibilities are unclear or every significant step requires another layer of approval.

This is where organisational structures and everyday practices become important.

What we often see in universities is a gap between people being given responsibility and not actually having the conditions to exercise it. Decisions continue to be made centrally or several levels above. Or people may be encouraged to innovate, but find that even relatively small experiments require multiple approvals.

The result is people learn to escalate: when something is difficult, decisions are pushed upwards.

When the system repeatedly teaches people that important decisions sit somewhere above them, seeking permission becomes a rational response.

One alternative is to create more room for local experimentation.

That doesn’t mean abandoning strategy or accountability. It means recognising that, in complex environments, you often discover what the right response is by trying something, seeing what happens and adapting.

A small experiment can generate information that another six months of planning cannot.

The question is not always how to make change happen faster. Sometimes it is about creating enough space for people to take the next useful step, learn from what happens and decide what to do next.

There is a balance here.

Too little freedom and people wait for permission. Too much freedom without clarity can create confusion, duplication or risk.

The task is not to remove structure, but to make the boundaries within which people can act clear enough that they don’t have to keep asking where those boundaries are.

If you’re interested in this way of working, these pieces explore some of the thinking and practice behind it:

• Rapid improvement looks at how groups can work on live problems through small-scale experiments, learning as they go rather than waiting for a perfect solution.
• Slowification provides a useful counterpoint to the idea that agency is about speed. Sometimes deliberately slowing down creates the space to understand the problem, involve the right people and learn properly from what you’re trying.
• Moving Beyond Top-Down Transformation: if change depends entirely on decisions being made at the top, the capacity of the institution to respond will always be constrained by the capacity of the people at the top.
• How distributed leadership can unlock decision-making in universities explores what happens when decision-making is distributed more widely rather than being concentrated at the top.
• From top-down to all-around: the transformation of organisational leadership looks more broadly at what changes when leadership is understood as something that can happen throughout an organisation rather than simply from the centre.

Collective agency in practice

Collective agency can sound abstract until you see it happening.

We’ve seen it develop repeatedly in our rapid improvement work, where groups come together in coalitions to work on problems that affect them directly.

Often, those problems initially appear to require a significant intervention: a new system, a substantial investment or a decision from somewhere higher in the organisation.

Bringing together the people who are actually involved in the work often changes the nature of the problem.

Someone knows how the process really works.
Someone else understands the technology.
Someone has a relationship with another team that needs to be involved.
Someone has tried something similar before.

Once those connections are made, the group doesn’t necessarily produce a perfect solution. It starts somewhere, learns from what happens and changes its approach as it learns.

The important outcome isn’t only the immediate improvement.

People stop thinking about the problem as belonging to another team, another department or another part of the institution.

People discover that they can influence something they previously assumed belonged to somebody else. They discover who else can help. They build relationships across boundaries. They begin to see themselves as people who can make things happen rather than people waiting for someone else to make them happen.

And that has an effect beyond the original problem.

One successful experiment makes another seem possible. A new relationship makes the next cross-boundary conversation easier. Someone who has discovered they can influence one part of the system may be more willing to try somewhere else.

This is what collective agency looks like in practice.

Not a grand programme of empowerment, but people discovering that, together, they can do more than they thought they could.

To explore this way of working in more detail:

Our Rapid Improvement work describes the practical methods we’ve used to support these kinds of projects.

We’re also continuing to develop our thinking around collaborative leadership and collective agency, and we’ll share more of that work in the coming months.

From ideas to action: practical tools for creating agency

Large-scale organisational change often attracts much of the attention in Higher Education.

Strategies are rewritten, structures are redesigned, new initiatives are launched.

But much of what shapes agency is also shaped by everyday practices.

It happens in conversations, in meetings, in the way decisions are delegated and responsibilities are defined.

Are people clear about what they are responsible for? Do they know where they have discretion and where they need to involve others? Are they getting useful feedback? Are leaders delegating responsibility or simply passing on tasks?

These things can sound relatively mundane compared with institutional transformation, but they have a direct effect on whether people feel able to exercise judgement and take responsibility.

We’ve developed a number of practical tools that can help:

Role clarity

People find it difficult to exercise agency when they aren’t clear about what is expected of them, where their responsibility starts and ends, or which decisions they can make themselves.

Take a look at our guide to running a Role Clarity exercise, it looks at some of the questions that help make those boundaries clearer without turning them into another layer of bureaucracy.

Feedback

Feedback can either reinforce dependency or build capability, depending on how it is used.

If feedback simply tells someone what they did wrong, they’re left waiting for the next instruction. But when it helps people understand what happened, what they might try differently and what they can learn, it builds their capacity to judge for themselves.

Our article, How NOT to give feedback to your staff, explores some of the ways feedback can unintentionally undermine development and what to do differently.

Delegation and CPORT

Delegation is often described as a way of freeing up a leader’s time.

But delegation can also create opportunities for people to exercise judgement and take responsibility, provided they are clear about what they are being asked to achieve and the boundaries within which they can act.

Read our CPORT approach to delegation – it provides a simple framework for doing that more deliberately.

Circle of Influence

It is easy to spend time trying to change things that are outside your control, particularly in large organisations where there are plenty of legitimate frustrations.

Circle of Influence is a simple way of shifting the conversation towards what people can actually influence, and what they might do with that influence.

Three Questions

Sometimes the most useful intervention is simply to understand what people need in order to move forward.

Our Three Questions approach gives leaders a straightforward way to explore what’s working, what’s getting in the way and where support might be useful.

None of these tools solve the agency problem on their own.

They’re practical ways of translating ideas about safety, confidence and agency into everyday practice.

Rethinking leadership in Higher Education

We started with a fairly simple observation: universities know a great deal about the challenges they face, yet often struggle to turn that knowledge into movement.

It is tempting to conclude that the answer is better leadership.

Sometimes it probably is.

But the more we work with universities, the less convinced we are that the answer lies simply in asking senior leaders to make better decisions, communicate more clearly or work harder.

The lack of progress within HE is not a consequence of a disinterested workforce.

It is, at least in part, the predictable outcome of structures and habits that have prioritised control over capability.

And yes, formal authority, governance and accountability still matter. There will always be decisions that need to be made by people with particular responsibilities.

But leadership isn’t always about holding the power.

Sometimes it is about creating the conditions in which people have the confidence to exercise their own power, expertise, and the relationships they already have.

So instead of asking: How do I empower people?
you could ask: How do I create the conditions in which people can act together?

That is a different way of thinking about leadership, and it has implications beyond any individual change programme.

If more people can speak honestly about what they see, believe they have something useful to contribute, and have enough room to act, the institution will have more capacity to respond to the changing landscape.

And if those people can connect their agency with others, organisational capacity grows.

Perhaps that is the shift we need to make: from thinking about agency as something we give people, towards distributed leadership and thinking about the conditions that allow agency to emerge.

That doesn’t happen through a single big intervention.

It is more likely to happen through a series of small changes in how decisions are made, how relationships are built, how people are involved and how much room they have to act.

Then, gradually, the organisation becomes a little more capable of responding for itself.

And perhaps that is when change starts to move.

If you’re interested in our approach, this article explores how small steps, experiments and a stronger sense of agency can help HE teams move forward.

Restoring agency and momentum in Higher Education:

• For HE Leaders & Managers: Join our monthly online peer support group to share challenges, swap strategies, and explore ways to build agency across HE peers: Register for the next HE peer support group.
• Free Diagnostic Call: Book a 30-minute diagnostic session to talk through the specific culture and leadership challenges in your institution: Book a 30-min diagnostic call.
• Further Reading: Look beneath the surface of workplace culture with The Iceberg Model or explore How to change culture in your organisation.

The post The Agency Crisis in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Why do people react so differently to change?

Some workplace behaviours can seem irrational until you understand what sits behind them.

An HE client we worked with recently had become hesitant to ask basic questions about their (hefty) expenses, which were taking months to recover. To them it seemed safer not to ask, even though they had the stress of juggling mortgage payments and credit card interest as a result.

On the surface, it didn’t make much sense. The query itself was entirely reasonable.

But this person had seen colleagues disappear overnight – leaving one day and not returning the next, with little explanation. Over time this created a kind of learned caution. They avoided drawing attention. They didn’t ask. Raising even a simple question began to feel risky.

Not because of the nature of the issue, but because of a loss of safety and predictability that made asking anything feel dangerous.

What can look like resistance, disengagement, or even incompetence makes perfect sense when you recognise that there may be a context you can’t see.

That story came back to me recently when I was completing a bid application and found myself staring at a question asking whether our practice was “trauma-informed”.

I had no immediate answer, and I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

So I looked it up.

There’s a growing body of thinking around trauma-informed practice. It appears in NHS guidance, local authority services and UK government materials.

What struck me though wasn’t the definition. It was the realisation that this was describing something we are already doing.

When you work in HE, it’s not difficult to see why a trauma-informed approach to leadership might matter.

I can think of clients who have gone through five restructures in ten years. Others who have reduced their headcount by 20% in one cycle. Teams that have been together for 20 years, broken apart. Change processes that have resulted in grievances and counter-grievances lasting years. And, in some cases, teams dealing with death and loss during the period we’ve been working with them.

If you’ve seen anything like this in your organisation, it’s likely that there is trauma present in the system.

Before digging into this further, this isn’t an excuse to pathologise, judge or “fix” people. Sometimes trauma comes from outside, sometimes from inside our organisational systems, and the ways we work can help or make it worse.

And I am noticing that this keeps showing up in our leadership work. It feels important to try and make sense of it.

Why trauma-informed leadership matters in Higher Education right now

Higher Education is operating in a context of ongoing change and uncertainty. When that’s combined with the impact of past experience, it can lead to unexpected responses that might be misinterpreted, and patterns of reaction and counter-reaction that can be difficult for everyone involved.

Many leaders talk about “resistance to change”, a catch-all term that implicitly blames “them” for not playing along, without understanding or valuing their lived experience.

For instance, have you ever noticed any of these happening?

• Strong reactions to relatively small things
• Silence where you might expect challenge
• Disproportionate responses to reasonable proposals
• Conflict avoidance leading to over-compliance

It’s easy to interpret such behaviours as resistance, attitude or poor performance.

And sometimes that might be the right interpretation. Sometimes though there is something else going on.

One way of making sense of that is through a trauma-informed lens.

Reframing behaviour: a lens, not a solution

At the heart of trauma-informed thinking is a simple shift in perspective: you have no idea what people are carrying.

Research – including studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) – suggests that trauma is not rare. In fact the opposite. It is statistically common, with around 60% of adults reporting significant adversity during childhood.

And that’s before you even consider what happens in adult working life.

So it’s reasonable to assume that in almost every team there will be lived experience of trauma present in some form, whether it is visible or not.

And it is not only personal histories that matter. Organisations can generate traumatic conditions too.

Repeated restructures. Job insecurity. Lack of transparency. Ongoing uncertainty. Systems that shift faster than people can absorb. These conditions shape how safe work feels.

There is growing evidence for this too, linking organisational conditions with job strain and stress-related outcomes. For example a 2-year study of Dutch health care employees found a strong relationship between jobs with high demands and low control, and psychosomatic sickness and absence.

However this is not about diagnosing people. It’s about shifting from a question of: “what’s wrong with them?” to: “what might they be responding to?”

That might be the conditions you’ve created. It might be physical exhaustion. It might be something carried from elsewhere in life. Or it might be all of these things at once.

A key point here is that this is a lens, not the lens.

Not everything is trauma. Poor performance still exists. Capability matters. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.

Trauma-informed leadership is not clinical expertise.

It is a practice of attention.

What trauma-informed leadership looks like in practice

When you start looking through a trauma-informed lens, you can sometimes make sense of reactions that initially seem surprising.

Example one: when consultation becomes a trigger

One client was working through a change process. In hindsight, they were probably rushing it and their consultation was a little performative.

The strength of feeling they encountered shocked them and sent them running for the hills. Communication broke down and we were asked to help.

Part of the anger came from a belief that the bosses weren’t really listening, and weren’t interested in hearing opposing views. A genuine safety concern was also being ignored.

That alone didn’t explain the intensity of the response.

It was layered onto a series of previous change processes that had already felt brutal, alongside a range of personal issues that created a perfect storm of frustration, grief and anxiety.

The consultation became the trigger point through which all of that exploded.

Example two: learned caution

The expenses story at the start of this article is more mundane, but perhaps more revealing.

The individual avoided drawing attention. They didn’t ask. They stayed quiet. They complied.

Not because of the nature of the issue, but because previous experiences had taught them that visibility might not be safe.

Example one describes an immediate shock.

Example two describes a slow burn.

Both make more sense in the context of past trauma.

Turning the lens inward

One of the more uncomfortable parts of this is that it doesn’t just apply to other people.

As leaders, we are not neutral in these systems.

We bring our own histories, anxieties, fragilities, even our shame into how we respond.

I was reminded of this recently after spending some time with my mother.

When I was 20, she made a decision to return to Germany. At the time, I supported it without hesitation. But the consequences of that decision have played out in ways I hadn’t fully registered.

On one visit, I found myself getting unexpectedly wound up trying to make sure she cooked food that my children could eat.

What I realised was that I’d stumbled into some unresolved anger about her decision to leave the UK all those years ago.

At a rational level, I understood her choice to leave. At an emotional level, it still has charge.

We often assume people are responding to what is happening now, when they may be responding to something from layers underneath.

And if we don’t have some awareness of our own triggers – the places where we become defensive, overly certain, or reactive – we are more likely to blunder.

The unintended consequence of venting my frustration with my mother was that everyone got upset. It was awkward for my family. I had to explain it all to my mum. There were tears and regrets.

In a work context this might show up as shutting conversations down, escalating conflict, or moving too quickly to judgement.

What trauma-informed leadership actually looks like

As a leader, none of this requires you to become a therapist.

It’s not about that.

In a similar way to our article on agency and leadership, this is about recognising the possibility of trauma and consciously working to create conditions in which people can think, contribute and make sense of what is happening around them.

A few simple shifts can help:

Assume sensitivity, not robustness

People are not all in the same place. Change is experienced unevenly. You may have been thinking about a change for weeks and already processed something that others are just encountering for the first time.

Create safety in small interactions

Are you aware of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of you? This is particularly important when something is at stake – giving feedback, responding to challenge, or communicating uncertainty. Do people feel shut down, exposed or rushed? Or do you allow space for them to think, respond and stay engaged?

Acknowledge reality, don’t smooth it over

Naming what is happening – even when it is difficult – can help. Acknowledging people’s experience, recognising it as real, relevant and significant matters. Forced positivity or premature closure often does the opposite.

Give agency where you can

Even small amounts of choice and involvement matter, especially in uncertain environments.

Pay attention to the system, not just the individual

Workload, fairness, transparency and organisational memory all shape how safe people feel. In many institutions none of that has been wholly positive for a while.

When this lens becomes particularly useful

There are certain situations where it is worth consciously holding a trauma-informed lens.

• Periods of significant change.
• Moments where reactions feel out of proportion.
• Silence where you would expect challenge.
• And those times where you find yourself becoming unusually defensive or impatient.

The risk of not considering this lens is that you may default too quickly to an easy judgement – labelling something as resistance, attitude or poor performance – and respond in a way that unintentionally escalates the situation.

In some cases, that can reinforce the very conditions that made the response more likely in the first place.

A necessary word of caution

A trauma-informed approach is not a silver bullet. It doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t replace other explanations.

And if you start over-interpreting and seeing trauma everywhere, you’ll lose clarity rather than gain it.

Sometimes behaviour is about capability.
Sometimes it is about disagreement.
Sometimes it is simply about fit.

And you will get it wrong.

But it does change the starting point. It helps you stop making everything about you, and
it encourages curiosity before judgement, context before conclusions, and understanding before intervention.

What this enables

When this lens is useful, it tends to create a few shifts in leadership practice.

Things slow slightly. Judgement turns into curiosity. You may become more aware of what has shaped people’s reactions.

And perhaps most importantly, it helps you recognise something quite simple: if you are leading change, you might already be through it, while others are just beginning to experience it.

That gap in timing can easily create misattunement, which is often where tension arises.

Questions for reflection

A few prompts that can help create space for reflection:

• How might someone’s reaction make more sense if you questioned your assumptions?
• What situations cause you to react strongly, or unexpectedly?
• Where might your organisation be creating unnecessary uncertainty or fear?
• Where has acknowledgement been missed?
• Where could you offer a little more agency?

You don’t need to know the answers to lead well.

But increasing your awareness of what might be going on beneath the surface can help.

And perhaps the simplest question is this: what have you seen handled well?

Further reading

Here are some links to further resources, including info on organisations who offer grounded, principled guidance.

Working with leadership teams in Higher Education

At ThenSomehow we help leaders, teams and institutions navigate change, culture and complexity. Our work creates the conditions for better conversations, stronger relationships and more effective collaboration, particularly during periods of uncertainty and transformation.

If you’re exploring how to support teams through change in your institution, we’d be happy to talk – get in touch here.

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According to the Guardian one in four major UK universities are reducing staff and budgets to manage deficits. We think it might be more than that. We actually think it might be all of them. It’s causing a lot of disquiet.

For many years we have supported Higher Education organisations to build capability in their teams, in order to be better able to respond to change in an increasingly complex world.

UK Universities Under Pressure

However the sector as a whole is now grappling with significant financial pressure due to rising costs, capped tuition fees, and a drop in numbers of international students. There has never been this kind of pressure before and HE has never had to be as accountable as it is now.

In response to these complex problems, institutions are having to change and adapt in new and deeper ways than they are used to.

And as HE institutions attempt to navigate these challenges and shift and adapt, HE people are having to interact with each other differently.

Why Change is So Challenging

As members of our HELP peer group who’re striving to drive change can attest, change efforts often struggle. Because, regardless of how big and radical or small and incremental, change is usually difficult and messy.

As an example, one project we ran at a London university to bring in distributed leading was really successful, but the university itself was in complete turmoil and many of those we worked with left or were made redundant afterwards.

The Hidden Barriers to Successful Change in HE

And I was chatting to someone who’d worked as a change manager for years at several organisations – for most of the projects that he worked on, the change either hadn’t happened due to what could be described as internal resistance or “tactical inertia”, or it had all been reversed when a new CEO was hired.

This is not uncommon.

Why Traditional Approaches to Change Don’t Work

In 2020, research and insight agency, Gartner reported that 50% of change initiatives fail, because of lack of leadership alignment, poor communication, employee resistance, and inadequate follow-through.

The trouble is that most change initiatives in universities seem to follow the same pattern: they’re top down, directive and focus on introducing new policies, new processes or new structures without taking into account or addressing the stuff that’s below the waterline – the underlying group dynamics that slow down change initiatives.

The reality is that most people don’t like being told to change.

The Harvard Business Review (2022) suggests that success rates of change programmes can be improved by good leadership, communication, and adaptability.

The Limits of Training Programmes

So how do you build capability in staff and your organisation to ensure change programmes are successful?

The solution used to be training. You sent individuals on a course to learn how to be good leaders but then it was realised that when they returned to work, they rarely applied what they had learned.

Partly because in real life they encounter a double whammy of complex people dynamics and volatile and uncertain conditions.

And partly because, we believe, the focus on training individuals is unhelpful.

The Power of Teams Over Individuals

We know from experience that effective teams really make a difference, more than individuals.

Which is why we believe organisations should be thinking about coaching people in teams, because teams are the unit of most effective change.

In fact research shows that teams are the most adequate framework for enabling collective learning.

While there is a growing recognition that groups and teams are a useful building block, HE organisations have tended not to train groups, which has led to a skills gap in helping teams to be more effective.

As a result the challenge for lots of organisations is that they haven’t addressed the stuff that’s below the waterline, things such as beliefs, feelings, values and identity – the very things that are threatened by change.

This is particularly important in leadership teams.

Leadership Isn’t a Role — It’s a Dynamic

Leaders have an organisational role of coordinating and holding the space, facilitating and removing blocks, arbitrating around priorities, and making decisions about the way organisations work.

But really effective leaders don’t ‘do’ any of these things, they emerge out of a leadership group’s dynamic and their conversations. When it’s really working, everyone is contributing.

When it’s not working, people don’t trust each other, don’t listen or don’t feel safe to speak up if they disagree and things can become toxic, which makes change programmes less effective.

How Team Coaching Helps Universities Navigate Change

One way to address this is to employ group or team coaching. The practice of team coaching helps to address the underlying factors that hold people back, as it can:

• turn conflict in teams into useful energy to get productive work done
• unblock teams that are struggling with decision-making
• support problem-solving and increase engagement
• increase confidence to explore beliefs, values and identity to bring in difference safely

Why Universities Need Internal Team Coaching Capabilities

At ThenSomehow we have been providing team coaching to the higher educational sector for many years. We’re seeing more demand for this kind of support as organisations struggle with the need to empower and organise people from the bottom upwards.

Many of the people we work with immediately apply the skills and learning in their day to day work. They use what they learn to make a difference straight away. They become better managers, colleagues, coaches or mentors.

It’s only a short leap to think about how these people could apply what they have learned to help other colleagues, and become effective team coaches themselves.

It seems like an obvious opportunity for organisations – to train their own people to support groups themselves.

And we’d like to help the people-side of universities to do that.

Our New Team Coaching Programme for HE Institutions

So we are announcing a new offer: Team coaching training programmes for OD professionals and managers working in HE.

As part of this we would like to build an active community of practice linking together people trying to do this sort of work across institutions.

We have developed a proven curriculum that we have applied over and over. We can build and iterate on this to really help a group of people share their skills and build an internal team coaching capability.

The Benefits for Your Institution

• Better functioning teams throughout an organisation.
• Reduced friction around change.
• Better ability for central OD and HR departments to service Faculty and School needs.
• Reduced reliance on external support.
• It is cost effective and builds a long lasting internal capability.

Join Our HE Team Coaching Programme

Get in touch here if you’re interested in leadership and team coaching for your organisation.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Navigating HE’s biggest challenges: a smarter approach to change appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The Iceberg Model is a compelling framework using the metaphor of an iceberg to show how the things that people do are supported by deeper, often unseen, values and beliefs. It is a valuable tool for grasping the complexities of workplace interactions, emphasising the importance of looking beyond the surface to understand the underlying layers that shape the way people behave the way they do.

Originally developed by anthropologist Edward Hall in 1976 in relation to a nation’s culture, the Iceberg model has since been applied to culture in organisations.

Why are implicit beliefs and values important in the workplace?

We often pretend that everything in the workplace is about results, actions, decisions – but building a cohesive team and getting things to run smoothly is much easier if you are willing to pay attention to what is going on below the waterline. Feelings, attitudes, needs, identity – are equally if not more important than the things you are usually expected to pay attention to.

And yet in most workplaces, we rarely talk about these things and instead focus on being ‘professional’.

However it makes sense to be aware of the human side of things at work – especially during a time of change or a reorganisation, because if you have empathy for people’s feelings and needs, and recognise the threat to their identity and security that a change can introduce, you can support them through a challenging period more effectively.

Why empathy is important in organisations

Empathy means being able to understand and relate to someone else’s view of the world without judgement and from their point of view.

As a leader, manager and as a colleague, empathy is useful as it can help you to:

• Recognise when your team members are upset, stressed or frustrated.
• Respond to their needs appropriately, and
• Avoid making things worse by failing to respect and acknowledge their reality, and instead help them by being curious about what is going on for them.

Intentionally pausing to ask yourself what might be going on for other people, and even better asking them the question is a great way to develop this skill.

How to use the Iceberg Model to build empathy

The iceberg model is a simple diagram of the human experience.

Like icebergs, what we see and know of others is generally just the tip of what is going on for people.

In the workplace, the explicit, above-the-waterline things commonly include:

• Results – the ability to achieve common goals. What your team accomplishes, not just the tasks they’re doing,
• Actions and decisions – the tasks and steps that need to be taken to achieve specific objectives or outcomes,
• Behaviours – observable actions, gestures, rituals, and customs that people engage in on a daily basis,
• Relationships – multifaceted interpersonal connections and rapport built between colleagues that promote trust, collaboration, and a positive team dynamic, or not,
• Communication – the exchange of information, ideas, and feedback among team members to achieve shared goals and foster collaboration.

These are easy to see.

What lies below the waterline?

What is harder to see in others is what is hidden, i.e. the implicit things that are below the surface.

This includes conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, attitudes, fears and assumptions which we aren’t aware of and don’t usually know much about, and in some cases neither might they!

These include things such as:

• Values – underlying beliefs and principles that define what is considered necessary, worthwhile, and desirable,
• Beliefs – accepted truths or convictions that people hold, including religious, moral, and philosophical,
• Feelings and intuitions – the emotional responses and gut instincts that influence how individuals perceive situations, make decisions, and interact with others,
• Attitudes and assumptions – unconscious, taken-for-granted aspects,
• Unwritten rules – unspoken subtle guidelines that govern social rules and the acceptable ways to navigate various situations,
• Needs – requirements essential for well-being and fulfilment,
• Fears – uncomfortable emotions aroused by impending danger, whether the threat is real or imagined,
• Identity – an individual’s mental image of themselves that provides meaning, direction, and a sense of self-control,
• Self-worth – the value you give to your life and achievements.

The famous thing about icebergs is that 90% of their mass is hidden below the waterline. That’s significant in organisational contexts too.

Scenario: Using the iceberg model to understand a new manager’s struggles

For example, if someone’s identity – the way they see themselves – is that of an academic with a fair amount of autonomy and quite a lot of freedom to manage their time and their interests, when they are promoted to head of department with managerial responsibilities, you might expect that they would be delighted. You might think that they saw this as an important next step in their career and that they had been selected for their suitability to the role.

A little while later when people start complaining about them, you might start to question their capability, shake your head sadly at the inevitability of underperforming academic leadership.

Of course something very different might have been going on for them. Maybe they didn’t ask for this role, but they were the last to step back when the call for volunteers was placed. “It’s my turn,” they may have thought. “I will be a good colleague and step up. I’m sure I will be supported with a Head of School to report to and lots of colleagues who have done it before to help. There is some training on offer too. Plus everyone seems to know what they are doing – it will be fine. I can finish my book over the summer break.”

Instead they receive a steady flow of colleagues bringing their complaints, problems, and legitimate needs, and they experience a corresponding loss of freedom to do the research and teaching prep they really wanted to do. It turned out to be a lot more challenging than they expected!

I don’t just mean from a time-management point of view. It might raise all sorts of internal questions about who they are: “was this a terrible mistake? Will my academic reputation ever recover?

“Will I miss out on promotion because I just can’t get to write those last two chapters?

“Do my colleagues respect me, because they certainly don’t seem interested in helping?

“Can everyone see just how much of an imposter I feel? Why has no one ever taught me how to do this?

“Why do I have to sort out the family holiday / put up the shelves / take my mother to the hospital on top of all this?

“It’s all my fault.. It’s not my fault…”

How might someone behave with all that going on?

They might become crabby, overly directive, or prone to spontaneous tears. They might freeze, paralysed by fears of failure, of losing their job, their career. They might lose all their confidence and find themselves isolated, alone and increasingly alarmed.

On the other hand, of course, they might discover a clear sense of purpose and direction. They might discover a natural aptitude, feel their confidence bloom and become brilliant at being a manager.

Though in the latter case I would bet it is probably preceded by the former angst. It will be a roller coaster however it pans out. All too often we see people in this situation with very limited support and certainly not set up to succeed.

And whatever someone from the outside concludes, there are always a lot of hidden things beneath the surface that are driving the behaviours that you can see.

If you are interacting with this person, it’d be good to have an appreciation of this, to be open to their perspectives and be curious about what is actually going on.

If Faculty managers started with the below the waterline stuff from the off, they would probably design the way they recruit, onboard and support new Heads of Departments differently.

How to use the Iceberg Model within your team

At ThenSomehow we present the Iceberg model at the start of workshops to set the scene for why relationships and relational aspects are so important in the workplace, why they can go awry so easily and why they can then become so hard to deal with.

What we explore with groups is how to go below the waterline, so that they can build a better understanding of what is going on.

Because the more you pay attention, the richer the picture becomes.

So at one level the Iceberg model is a checklist you can use to make sure you are thinking about the right kinds of things. It definitely helps to be thinking about this stuff, but you cannot know for sure.

Unless you ask them.

How to use the iceberg model with groups

The iceberg model is a useful prompt for a better kind of conversation. It’s a way into what might otherwise be an awkward conversation. It is especially powerful when you have that conversation as a group.

That way everyone gets to hear from others and you can build a shared understanding of what is going on; with all the nuanced differences. You all get to appreciate the needs and fears of the group. You discover what you have in common and where you differ. You listen and share, you build trust, you make meaning together, you can all respect that. You all get to feel heard and not alone and empowered to respond, not just react, to what’s happening around you.

If you are in a leadership role, it’s not a tool you can use to get ‘leverage’ or ‘influence’ and manipulate the people around you: to control them in any predictable way.

Instead it’s more about holding a space for building shared understanding so you can align around shared needs.

Creating spaces like that is one way you can help people rethink who they are in an uncertain and evolving environment. The iceberg metaphor is a helpful way to enable others into that conversation. That is, I think, truly important work for leaders, managers and colleagues to be doing together.

Case Study: How we used the iceberg model with a university client group

We have been working with a client group that is a blend of professional services people and academics from a UK university. Some in the group are in senior leadership roles, others are mid-grade and one is a lower grade. It is a really interesting mix.

The aim of the group is to explore a new paradigm for leading the particular HE school they work at. This is being done in a very transparent and open way.

In one Action Learning Set the most senior person was describing a situation that everybody in the group had empathy with: a difficult colleague who had been creating some low level toxicity, and who they were avoiding as a result.

The wisdom and advice that came from the group was incredibly useful for this senior person, yet it came from people who were the most junior.

Several of them shared how they shy away from conflict, and how it’s easier to avoid difficult people.

“But what might be driving that behaviour?” others asked. “What are the anxieties or the fears that are driving them?”

“Are there ways that you might support that person so that you diffuse some of the negative behaviours, because you found a way for them to reframe their identity, for example?” asked one junior person, who had fully understood the iceberg model.

It was a really interesting way of putting it because ignoring it won’t go away. And continuing to do the same thing isn’t going to work either.

“We can never grow to become great business leaders until we actively strive to embrace the behaviours and attitudes that feel most uncomfortable to us.”
Charles Hampden-Turner

How keeping an open mind reduces emotional reactions at work

Keeping an open mind allows you to move beyond snap judgments and consider alternative explanations for people’s behaviour. This can transform your emotional reaction and create opportunities to engage more constructively.
For instance, if one of your team members misses a deadline, your initial reaction might be frustration, thinking they’re lazy or uncommitted. But what if there’s another reason?

• They may be dealing with a family emergency.
• They might be stuck on a task but unsure how to ask for help.
• Or perhaps they did send the work, but it landed in your spam folder. (It’s worth checking!)

The goal isn’t to guess the exact cause but to remain open to the possibilities. By reframing the situation, you can reduce the intensity of your emotional response. This helps you stay composed, manage your reactions, and approach the issue with a mindset geared toward problem-solving rather than blame.

The Iceberg Model supports this process by encouraging you to look beyond the surface – the missed deadline – and consider what unseen factors might be at play.

Using the iceberg model in your team

To lead and manage effectively, it’s essential to understand what’s driving your team members’ behaviours. The Iceberg Model offers a framework to explore these underlying factors — implicit beliefs, values, and past experiences — that are shaping their actions.

Here are some ways to delve beneath the waterline:

• Facilitate Open Conversations: Create a space for team members to share their thoughts and feelings about a specific issue. Ask open-ended questions and listen actively to uncover hidden concerns or motivations.
• Explore Core Values: Discuss what matters most to your team members. If someone has a concern or reaction to something that happened, pause to explore what feelings, assumptions or beliefs might be driving that reaction. Understanding how our beliefs and values can differ helps illuminate why others respond to situations in different ways.
• Reflect on Past Experiences: Acknowledge how previous challenges, successes, or relationships might influence our responses and behaviour. A great way to practice this regularly is to run retro’s during and at the end of projects to reflect on how people are experiencing working together (we are specifically not talking about the project tasks in these moments).

For example, a team member might hesitate to speak up in meetings because of cultural norms or past experiences where they were dismissed. Another might seem overly cautious around leadership because of a difficult relationship with a previous boss.

By using the Iceberg Model, you can approach situations with curiosity and empathy, recognising that behaviours often stem from complex, unseen influences. This broader perspective can not only help you lead more effectively but can also build trust and strengthen your team’s culture.

Ready to look beneath the surface of your organisation’s culture?

• For Higher Education Leaders: Join our monthly online peer support group to share challenges, swap strategies, and explore culture change with HE peers. Register for the next peer support call.
• For Leadership Teams: Need practical tools to shift stuck culture, build emotional literacy, and move forward? Get in touch with ThenSomehow here.

The post The Iceberg Model: how it helps to understand organisational culture appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The continual feedback from departments about their culture was, “We’ve got this locally, but we’re really bemused by what’s going on elsewhere in the network.”

A networked approach to culture change

In a similar piece of work at another institution, we found extraordinarily vehement resistance to change within one faculty, because the requirement to adopt a uniform approach felt like a threat to their identity and completely ignored the fact that they had a unique situation. They did a lot of work with external partners, requiring a different approach, but there was no recognition from the top that something else was needed for them.

In our work with large organisations like universities, we come across these kinds of situations fairly often. In more than one institution we have been struck by how the strength of identity and sense of belonging diminishes as you move away from the local team. The further away someone is from the central administrative hub, the looser their feeling of affiliation to the organisation as a whole.

The effect is that people in universities often feel siloed, and individual departments and faculties feel disconnected from each other

We’ve come to the conclusion that it might be better to think of a university as a network of distinct and differing communities each with its own unique identity and ways of doing things, rather than a single entity.

This way of thinking could shift the approach to change in any organisation.

Changing the view, changes the change programme

When thinking about making a change or ‘transforming’ an organisation, how often is the starting point an unspoken assumption that it is a single entity? If you started with a different view instead – that you are dealing with individual but connected groups, how might that change how you approach the challenge?

Most of us tend to be drawn to solutions that can be applied across the board, but what if that approach is starting from the wrong place?

The idea of a harmonised uniform process that flows smoothly across all departments so that errors are reduced, data is easy to collate and anyone can step in to help because it’s all the same, is tremendously attractive.

The problem though, is that clean, simple, uniform solutions are often not flexible enough to accommodate the inevitable exceptions.

When the universal solution doesn’t fit

To give an example from another area of our work, one department manager revealed with exasperation that at least 40% of their programmes were ‘non standard’ requiring manual workarounds every time a member of staff interacted with the programme software.

That is a huge amount of wasted effort every day.

So when faced with the requirement to implement a uniform approach that will not work, a team is likely to be highly stressed by the request – especially when no one at the top seems interested that the standard solution does not fit.

Perhaps that is why there is so often discomfort around top-down change programmes – because ‘non standard deviations’ are not recognised or accommodated.

Why consistency is better than uniformity

As someone from one university pointed out, there’s a difference between consistency and uniformity.

The idea of consistency is interesting. Rather than a uniform set of actions, it might mean thinking about underlying principles and values, and the required outcomes. If those are clear might it be okay for local adaptation that works in each specific context?

How we’re changing to a networked model at Then Somehow

We’ve been so struck by this ‘network of communities’ way of thinking that we have taken it on as an experiment of our own: we’re now trying to reframe the way we work together at Then Somehow.

Until recently we have been organised as a ‘hub and spoke’ (just like ‘the centre’ in a university), with the founder in the middle and everyone separately connecting with them.

That has felt constraining and that we’re missing out somehow. So a few weeks ago at our team away day we talked about what we could do to create more of an interconnected ‘point-to-point’ network, and what might we do differently.

Meeting and thinking like this has been a really interesting experiment in the way that we work and is already leading to good outcomes.

There’s a whole bunch of unspoken assumptions that we have started to subvert a little bit which is making space for creativity and other interesting things to emerge.

Notably a few people have been making a point of hanging out together, and developing new possibilities to work with each other.

It’s early days but we’re very curious to see what happens next.

The Power of Networked Thinking

What strikes us most about this is the untapped power of these networks when you apply this kind of thinking.

And we’re very curious about what happens when you reimagine organisations as networks of communities. Rather than trying to make everything uniform, could you let people solve problems locally? What if you design processes or platforms that encourage people to link up with each other?

How might that transform the way people engage with change? If you start with the assumption that an organisation is a coherent consistent whole, you approach change in a certain way. If you see it as a network of communities, it might completely shift the way you think about it.

Of course some change projects are born of crisis, driven by the compelling need to save money quickly. In a crisis you often crave the fastest, cleanest simplest path possible. Seeing an organisation as a single uniform controllable and biddable thing is attractive and reassuring. In a crisis you need urgency and compliance, and you might design a process according to those needs rather than the needs of the people you want to make the changes.

In truth those people also recognise the need to save money, and their jobs. They also want to protect the mission of their institutions: the thing that gives them their sense of purpose. And they are best placed to find the solutions that can make that possible.

The very moment you crave uniformity and compliance might be the moment you need to let go of them. The more you dig under the skin of any large institution, the more people will explain to you why they’re different. Maybe they are not wrong. We know from our work with institutions that there are ways you can distribute leadership, and trust people to solve problems in adaptive and non-uniform but consistent, and creative, ways.

Whilst the challenges across an organisation are fundamentally universal and shared, and broadly speaking the solutions are the same, the way you might go about achieving the solutions could be different. Or there might be special flavours that you can apply in one place that you can’t in another.

So how could you equip people, give them the time and allow them to solve a problem locally? And do that in a way that isn’t so at odds with everybody else that it becomes impossible to integrate.

What this means for people who are attempting to bring about change is to encourage them to see any community or organisation as a group of diverse individuals, to talk to them and hear their points of view, and to facilitate conversations where other people can hear these points of view too.

Because then the group as a whole has the information that it needs to change its future.

We’d love to know what you think about this – does any of it resonate or inspire, or would you like to challenge it? Get in touch and let us know.

At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Why your organisation is really a network of communities appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Trauma in organisations can show up in many guises. It can appear following a clumsy restructure, or through the long shadow cast by an unchallenged bully, or perhaps due to the loss of a colleague through illness.

These kinds of things, and others, can have a significant impact on individuals and groups. If they are not acknowledged people can feel disrespected and diminished, and triggered into passionate reactions. And it doesn’t just affect motivation. The rage and indignation people feel can limit their capacity, as they have less space to deal with tasks or solve problems.

The narratives of frustration that commonly emerge are often self limiting too: whole groups can feel victimised and rally around that identity. This group identity is powerful and can feel enormously supportive for those affected. Meanwhile those outside the group or who are perceived to threaten it (and that identity) can experience fierce resistance and challenge. These patterns, once established, can endure for years.

It makes sense then to pay attention to the human side of things – and the things that go on ‘below the waterline’ – especially during a reorganisation, after all 70% of change programmes fail due to employee resistance and lack of management support.

Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Organisational Change

As an example, we have been working with one institution who went through a seismic shift after a drop in numbers of international students. The leadership team was poorly equipped to deal with the resulting financial crisis and pushed through a reorganisation – downsizing the workforce, rationalising courses – to make the numbers add up, but they underestimated the harm that this caused the workforce. A failure to listen and include people led to a belief that it was all happening behind closed doors and people felt powerless to defend themselves.

As a result, a lot of tension bubbled up throughout the whole institution. Staff at all levels felt disempowered and devalued, as a consequence they could behave aggressively and unpredictably, lashing out in any direction. There was a lot of dissatisfaction, and low trust. Others at all levels were frightened to speak up or stand out on any topic, scared of making themselves a target.

You could understand, if not condone these behaviours. In truth the reorganisation was pushed through in ways that were more damaging than they needed to be. People felt they had not been listened to. They felt excluded and marginalised, their very identity threatened: they felt powerless. And then they found a way to regain that lost agency through (non physical) violence. Which reinforced an unhelpful cycle. All parties became entrenched and less open to dialogue, and everyone experienced it in ways that were detrimental.

And there will be medium to long term repercussions. There is a lot of work to do to rebuild trust.

The Long-Term Effects of Organisational Trauma

Another of our clients experienced a similar trauma, but for different reasons. They had a comparable financial crunch, but leadership turned it around and got the organisation into a strong position. They are hiring and building teams again after a period of cutting everything.

But after a decade-long cycle of running out of money and cutting jobs every few years, some people have spent 10-years in an extended period of uncertainty, lurching from feeling at risk of redundancy and then being told their jobs are safe, and back again.

That creates trauma that has a lasting impact.

One effect is that while the new hires are coming in with enthusiasm, belief and confidence, they’re encountering a group of jaded, traumatised colleagues who do not share the excitement, and who actually mistrust everything because in their experience, new initiatives always fade into disappointment and loss.

In addition, the directive behaviours of the leadership team which were so necessary during the turnaround, are no longer a good fit. People who feel motivated to own their challenges find themselves pulled up and needing permission to act, creating the risk they will be as discouraged as those who survived the reorganisation.

Part of the issue is that there is no real acknowledgement that half the workforce are in a traumatised state – which shows up as people being slow to respond, wilfully resistant and deeply sceptical of new people.

No one is talking about it, and it’s not factored into how they’re planning changes. There isn’t a trauma-informed leadership approach.

Some of the new people are really sensitive to this, but the leadership team aren’t (and their expectations for the pace of change may be too high). So while some see the need to go steadily and regain trust, others are pushing hard and achieving the opposite.

Overcoming Resistance with a Trauma-Informed Approach

In a trauma-informed leadership approach, leaders and organisations work with the trauma to overcome the resistance that otherwise emerges in reaction. This doesn’t mean changing the outcome of decisions or the work that needs doing, it’s about how you do it.

For leaders this means:

• Recognising you have a choice to lead differently
• Being aware of what has gone on before
• Acknowledging that these things have happened
• Taking care to communicate in a way that generates psychological safety
• Demonstrating that you are listening, by making people feel heard
• Designing work to give people agency – in the way decisions are made and the way they are deployed.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Trauma-Informed Leadership

This is important work, but it is really common for people to overlook a key part of it.

We worked with one leader who badly misstepped when they arrived after a reorganisation. They had joined with excitement, enthusiasm and clarity, and said, “I know you’ve had a horrible time, but this is the turning point, let’s focus on the future, we can rebuild this.”

However their team didn’t appreciate the forced positivity, “We’re still having a terrible time! We haven’t overcome it and pretending everything is okay is not helping,” they said (to each other, but not to their new boss).

The new leader quickly lost trust and has been on the back foot ever since. It doesn’t matter what they say now, the team interprets it in a negative way – they want to blame somebody for the harm they have experienced for all those years, and it’s their new boss. This is difficult – and it’s not understood by the new leader’s peer group or their own boss, and it’s not something they can easily fix on their own. It takes a lot of work to rebuild trust.

Key Practices for Trauma-Informed Leadership

The process of understanding the context, empathising with people’s experience of a situation, and working through it – crucially – with them, is a way to start to change and release the trauma.

If you’re interested, our approach to trauma-informed leadership is to use our core toolkit for this: to help leaders respond differently by supporting them to rethink how they engage as leaders.

The support we offer is practical, emotionally informed and applied – at the core it is about experimentation, feedback and iteration.

This is not traditional training for leaders, instead it includes:

• Practising listening and talking to each other using various tools
• Applying the process to yourselves so you become a stronger team
• Helping you design how you will lead the change you want to see and taking a different approach. This means having conversations with people and involving them in how to get there.
• Helping you see your role as a convener and permission provider – learning from who you are.
• Moving from ‘we need to prioritise communicating information in scalable efficient ways’, to ‘we need to prioritise communicating information in psychologically safe ways.’

The Role of Communication in Trauma-Informed Leadership

If you don’t adopt an approach like this, you will continue to come up against trauma and inertia, and will traumatise people even more.

Does this resonate with your organisation? We’d love to hear from you.

There some links to further reading and trauma-informed resources here.

At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Trauma-informed leadership: why you need to listen before implementing change appeared first on ThenSomehow.

You’re not alone. We’re about to do a piece of work with a university in response to their frustration over clunky, time consuming processes. The challenge has been that everyone is just too busy to fix them.

When admin processes don’t work

Not having time to fix stuff that takes up all your time because it doesn’t work properly is more than a little bit ironic. Lots of organisations tell us they have this challenge and find it hard to do anything about it.

In a university these problems could be anything from administering enrollment, managing an extenuating circumstances request, or collecting and maintaining student data.

It’s quite common for these to need manual intervention because different bits of software don’t talk to each other. Unfortunately transferring data from one to the other is time consuming and can introduce errors.

Clients often say, “We need to fix this so we don’t find ourselves in the same situation next year.”

Yet when everyone is really busy, it’s hard to find time to fix anything. In a year’s time the organisation is in exactly the same place and everyone is just as frustrated.

Do you have a problem like this?

Why interim staff are not a real solution

Many institutions feel forced to solve these kinds of issues by bringing in external staff on interim contracts to deliver the fix that everyone else is too busy to do.

If the aim of the project is to deploy a new piece of software to solve, say, a pressing enrolment issue, there’ll be a working group formed to provide input but who are too busy to do the work or who don’t have the technical skills. The actual delivery team will be made up of specialist interim contractors. Once their work is completed, the software users will receive training on how to use it.

The expectation is that the new system will have a transformational impact, but often even the commissioning team can be too busy to test it after it is built. And none of the users will have learned anything about how to specify what they need, or how to design the service so that it meets their customer’s needs, or how to collaborate with other parts of the organisation who might also be affected.

The coup de grace is that hiring interim staff on short-term contracts is really expensive. They don’t have the institutional knowledge which introduces some risk, and having done the work, they leave and the university is not much better off.

The original problem might be solved but the organisation’s capability hasn’t been increased.

As an example we have one client looking at data analytics as part of a programme of change management and project delivery. Their entire team was made up of interim staff on 12- to 18- month contracts because they needed to get the project going and didn’t have the people internally, “I couldn’t wait to hire people because it would take too long and we needed to experiment and work out how it was going to work,” they said.

A programme designed to help you to solve the staffing problem internally

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of spending money like this on interim contractors, you funded your own people to solve these problems, especially as often the answers to design issues are already in the room. The best solutions need the thinking from the people who are intimately involved with the problem after all.

So the programme we’ve been discussing is this: take colleagues away from their usual role – with the freedom not to do their day job – and give them the time to fix the problem, with some help.

Their day jobs will be backfilled from within the organisation, or from less expensive temporary contractors, and we’ll put a wrapper of support around participants that includes project management, soft skills training and technical skills training for specific aspects of the project.

They’ll be supported to work in collaboration, and form networks as a part of solving the problem.

In this way, at the end of the project the university will have:

• solved the problem they needed fixing
• a group of people who are better connected within the organisation
• a group who have learned a range of skills they can deploy in other contexts
• individuals who are more confident and more able to affect change
• people who have increased their career mobility.

It would be cheaper than hiring specialist interim contractors and you’d end up with an organisation that was better equipped and more mobile. Wouldn’t that be great?

Empowering your team to build lasting capability

From our point of view, this is an exciting vision – of capability development combined with project delivery.

It requires a combination of technical skills training (which we don’t offer), with soft skills training and coalitions facilitation (which we do) that would include things like:

• Working smarter to learn how to make time for important work
• How to influence with authority
• How to lead from the middle (distributed leadership)
• How to form coalitions and make them work
• How to manage expectations and manage up

This is different to the way that institutions usually fix things, and is the kind of work we really love doing – because it empowers people to create value and builds lasting capability in an organisation.

If you were to consider such an applied programme, how would you design it? What are the projects that lend themselves to this kind of intervention and what would the support curriculum need to look like?

We’d love to hear from you.

At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Are you burning cash on interim staff and still not getting where you want to be? appeared first on ThenSomehow.

As a manager in an organisation, awkward, difficult conversations are inevitable, but they don’t have to be a minefield.

Regardless of whether you need to hold a colleague accountable for something they did or didn’t do, tell your boss that their request is no longer possible, or confront a team member about their disrespectful behaviour, with the right approach you can successfully navigate them without feeling stressed, anxious or uncomfortable.

It may be tempting to dodge these chats, but sweeping problems under the rug is far from a solution. Surprisingly, a significant 70% of employees tend to avoid these tough talks, leading to simmering issues within teams.

Difficult conversations with your boss or colleague may be a bleak prospect, but putting it off and ignoring problems hoping they will resolve themselves can make matters worse.

For instance, not telling someone about a delay might escalate into larger issues later. Keeping quiet about concerns can lead to project failures, and unchecked disrespectful behaviour can disrupt team dynamics, turning into unhealthy conflict that can have a bigger impact on your team’s performance.

Why Difficult Conversations Matter. A real life example

Consider this real-life scenario where a new manager we were supporting in a large organisation faced passive-aggressive behaviour from a senior member in their team. This team member had been passed over for promotion and was not happy: they questioned every suggestion and proposal to the point of destruction, exhausting everybody on the team.

Instead of confronting the issue, the manager tolerated the behaviour which led to unproductive conduct: the person concerned continued to sabotage everything, holding the team back and keeping everyone stuck.

We advised the manager to tell this person in a clear and respectful way that their behaviour was not okay and had to stop. They needed to say that it was affecting them, the work and everyone else too.

Unfortunately they initially didn’t feel able to – instead adopting a ‘do nothing’ strategy, something that is more common than you might think.

A fear of conflict will see people putting up with a great deal. Fierce Conversations found that the number one response to coping with toxic employees is to ignore them, with almost half hoping the issue will magically disappear.

According to a survey by Vitalsmarts the most common difficult conversations that people tend to put off, range from dealing with rude behaviour to challenging faulty proposals and addressing incompetent colleagues.

This “do nothing” approach might seem like an easy way out but it’s far from effective. The postponed conversations result in a negative atmosphere at work where people ruminate, complain, and engage in unnecessary work, all because they’re avoiding the core issue.

Moreover, there’s a significant financial impact, with each delayed conversation estimated to cost anywhere from $100 to $5,000.

Regardless of how delicate the issue or how grim the news, the most effective approach is to address it head on and engage in a conversation with the individual involved, no matter how challenging it may seem.

In our example above, the manager finally took the initiative and calmly explained to their colleague the impact it was having on them personally. The response was dramatic. There was an apology followed by a frank and open conversation. The person’s behaviour improved, though ultimately they made the decision to leave as their frustration was with the organisation rather than with the manager.

Often embracing the conflict leads to good things. So remember, if you are faced with similar situations, think what is the best that could happen rather than the worst.

How to Navigate Tough Conversations with Your Team

Mastering difficult conversations is a crucial skill for managers in any organisation. Practice is key; the more you do it, the more confident and adept you become at having the conversation with respect and honesty, which will always lead to better outcomes.

Try this 5-step framework – it will help you get better at tough talks and as you practise, your confidence will grow.

Step-by-Step Framework for Handling Challenging Discussions:

1. Face the situation head on
2. Empathise with the other person
3. Use an I-Statement
4. Use the FONT tool
5. Respond in a different way

Here is more information about each of these steps, with examples of how to use all the above at the end:

Step 1: Confront the Issue Directly

Talking about a sensitive subject can be an anxiety inducing prospect, but avoiding it only prolongs the issue. You may be worried that the other person will be defensive or won’t listen, or that they’ll be angry and aggressive. They might do any or all of these things but if you don’t try, you won’t make any progress at all. You’ll just be stuck in a difficult situation.

And you’ll probably find that it’s not nearly as bad as you imagined.

Step 2: Practice Empathy Before Engaging

There are many reasons why someone is behaving in a particular way. If they are delivering poor work, they may be struggling but be unable to ask for help. If they are not motivated, they could have issues at home. If they are being rude they may be feeling wronged by the way they’ve been treated.

Try empathising with their situation before you start talking. As their manager, your aim should be to support them while addressing their behaviour.

Step 3: Communicate Using ‘I’ Statements

Express your feelings clearly using an “I” Statement to tell the other person how you are feeling in a clear, effective and truthful manner.

“I” Statements are a powerful way to help you express your point to someone else without causing them to feel defensive or aggressive, which allows them to respond rather than react.

The way to do this is to structure what you say in this way: “I feel X when you do Y, and [how their behaviour affects you].” For instance, say, “I feel upset when you say things like that, and this is affecting our working relationship.”

This approach fosters genuine dialogue by focusing on the consequences of behaviour rather than blaming the person.

If instead you start the conversation with the other person’s actions, or say “you make me really angry when you do X,” you’re blaming them and giving them the message that they are the problem.

NB Be careful not to turn an I-Statement into a ‘blaming-you-statement-pretending-to-be-an I-Statement. Eg “I feel that you are passive-aggressive,” is not an “I” Statement.

Step 4: Understand the FONT Tool to Improve Conversations

FONT (Feelings, Observations, Needs, Thoughts) is a way to decode a conversation so that you understand what’s really going on for people.

Despite their importance, most people don’t bring their wants and feelings into the workplace. However you’ll find it harder to resolve an awkward conversation and increase your chances of receiving a defensive response if you attempt to handle it without discussing their needs and feelings.

FONT is a way to become more aware of what is going on, both for yourself and what you are sensing from the other person. The four categories will help you break the conversation down.

For example, I might be observing your body language and notice that you’re being defensive. I might think, “This is going to end really badly. We’re going to start shouting and she may storm out.”

With that information, I could stop trying to tell you something, and instead ask a question: “I noticed that you raised your voice when you said that. What’s going on for you? How are you feeling?”

The ultimate aim of FONT is to increase your awareness of what the other person is feeling, and to bring that into the conversation. If you can do that, you are more likely to have a much more valuable conversation.

If you just stick to actions, decisions, communication and results (ie the bit above the waterline in the iceberg model, you’ll have limited leverage to change anything.

The first time you try using FONT, you may find you’re really good at working out the thoughts and observations parts, but not so good at recognising feelings or needs.

The more you practise, the more you’re able to do it on the fly.

The five core emotions
To help you identify what people are feeling, this is a helpful shortcut to use alongside FONT, the five core emotions:

• MAD (Angry)
• SAD
• GLAD
• HURT
• SCARED

If you can find a way for the person to tell you how they’re feeling, for example they might say, “I’m feeling both angry and anxious (scared),” then you might be able to empathise with them and work together to find a solution.

If their needs include being acknowledged, and a sense of feeling valued, look for opportunities to recognise them and point out their positive traits to make them feel more appreciated.

There are two ways to work with FONT:

i. In the moment
Use it to guide the conversation towards the true issue at hand. This frequently leads to a really liberating conversation. It takes practice, however your attempt won’t necessarily fail, even if it doesn’t work out the first time.

ii. Reflecting after the fact
To better understand what happened, go back over the conversation and replay it using FONT. What did you notice? What was going through your mind? What might they have been thinking? What emotions might they have had? Which needs might be motivating them?

Even if the situation fails in the moment, taking some time to reflect on what you could have done differently will help you next time, since you’ll be more prepared and be able to try something new.

Being able to say to someone, “I can see you are getting upset,” and asking, “How are you feeling?” can help to resolve the situation. If they are able to be truthful about what they’re feeling, you can say, “Okay, let’s talk about what you need.”

Step 5: Respond with the opposite

This is an approach that’s helpful if someone is either very emotional or bombards you with facts:

• When faced with facts, respond with emotions.
• If they are very emotional, point to the facts.

Imagine an awkward conversation with a colleague who’s delivered a poor piece of work. They might start listing all of the reasons why it’s not their fault. Using facts and figures to build their case. In doing that, they’re being defensive and it will be hard to move the conversation forward. If you respond with how you feel, you can shift that dynamic. Breaking down barriers in a difficult conversation opens up possibilities for transformation.

Or perhaps the opposite happens and they start crying or become really angry. A way to respond is to, firstly, empathise with their feelings, then bring in some facts to try and get back into a conversation.

This is a useful approach if you find yourself stuck because it’s easy to remember.

Three examples of difficult situations and how to deal with them

These are examples where difficult conversations might become dysfunctional, and where people can easily become defensive:

1. There is a restructure and jobs are at risk
2. Someone is not doing their job properly
3. A colleague is being offensive

i. People are at risk of redundancy during a restructure

If you have to restructure your team, some people’s jobs may have to be cut. People often come into those conversations with a lot of anxiety. The minute you tell them what is happening, they will be worrying about money.

Their anxiety could be unwarranted, because they may be at less risk than they think. But because they’re nervous, they may become antagonistic or aggressive. They might, for example, threaten to bring in a union rep.

What to do? Use FONT to find out what is going on for them and to reflect on what they fundamentally need.

For example, you might notice that they’re agitated, that their voice is raised and they’re being aggressive. You might be feeling nervous yourself – it is never nice to pass on this kind of news – and you might start being defensive. If the conversation spins out of control, our best advice is to stop, identify what you’re observing, and ask what they are feeling.

If they tell you they are angry after all the work they have done, calm them down by talking about what the options are. There might be options to redeploy them or a number of other roles and opportunities they could consider applying for.

Communicate what the scale of the risk is: “Even though there will not be enough posts left after the restructure, some people on the team want to leave anyway. So actually, you’re a lot less at risk than you realise. Maybe this is an opportunity, because in the new posts there are more opportunities for development. You could expect to get a pay rise.”

If their original reaction to the news was: “I am so angry because of the way this was communicated.” Their need is for an apology and a recognition of the harm that’s been done.

By addressing that need, you can move the conversation to a different place.

ii. “You are not doing your job properly, you need to improve”

Someone you are managing is performing badly. You arrange a conversation with them to discuss the situation.

You have a ‘you need to improve’ conversation but there is a thought at the back of your mind that, “this is all going to end in a formal performance management process.”

You know that’s a challenging and uncomfortable process for the person concerned and likely your relationship with them will be destroyed in the process. They’ll end up leaving anyway which may be what you really wanted, but they’re miserable and you’re miserable.

Just the thought of that could cause the conversation to be a clumsy one. However it’s avoidable if you can intervene early enough.

If you’re able to talk to them early, use The Three Key Questions to help them understand what you need and how they’re measuring up:

• Do they know what’s expected of them?
• Do they know how they’re doing? and
• Do they know where they’re heading?

In that conversation you have to be really clear about what is expected of them. Then you can monitor how they are doing, and you can identify what help they might need to do it. They’ll (hopefully) improve and you’re more likely to avoid the whole performance management process.

Win-win.

iii. A member of staff is being offensive

Sharon has made a complaint about Annie. You’ve only heard Sharon’s side of the story and you’d like to know what happened from Annie’s point of view. In this case, FONT can help you figure out what actually happened and come up with some choices for how to respond.

Annie says: “Sharon left her dirty coffee cup on the side in the kitchen. It seems a small thing but I just lost it. I shouted at her and I might have called her a rude name, because I always do the washing up – no one else does it and no one ever says thank you.”

As her manager you might say: “I’m noticing that as you talk about it your voice is raised. It seems that you’re still angry and upset about it. How’re you feeling right now?”
Annie: “Sorry. I was just so angry.”
You: “What do you need?”
Annie: “I need to not be the only person who cares about this stuff.”

You: “Did you know that Sharon had put her things in the dishwasher but it was full she had to reorganise it. Some bits didn’t fit back in so she put them on the side and put the dishwasher on, intending to come back later and finish it.”

Annie: “Oh … I didn’t know that. I’ll apologise and try not to react in future.”

You: “Thank you, that sounds good.”

Key Tools to Improve Your Conversations

Difficult conversations can be daunting but there are strategies for making them better. Having read this, we hope you have more of a grasp on how to handle them, plus a couple of useful tools that you can try. With experience, difficult conversations will become easier, leading to more productive dialogues and better results.

At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

For more strategies, tactics and tools for managers, read our comprehensive guide on how to be a more effective manager.

The post Difficult conversations: how to master them with confidence. A guide for managers. appeared first on ThenSomehow.

As a manager, you may spend a fair bit of time trying to make sure everyone gets along and steering people clear of fights and confrontation, with the aim that your team be as effective as possible.

Why ‘fight’ is hard to avoid in teams

Conflict in teams is hard to avoid because workplaces create conflict by their very nature. Decisions have to be taken that may not have 100% agreement, projects don’t always run smoothly, people get promoted or passed over. There are always trade-offs to be made and people’s feelings are affected by all sorts of things. Not to mention that when groups of people work together, they will sometimes interrupt each other, complain, and be spiky. Human beings can easily rub each other up the wrong way!

Psychologist and business strategist Liane Davey says, “The question is whether conflict can be discussed in a healthy way that you can get through, or whether it goes underground and festers like a root fire that smoulders for months or even years.”

Lifting the lid on conflict

Whilst you may be afraid that if you lift the lid on Pandora’s box, people will get hurt and collaboration will be impossible, actually fights are more valuable to your team than you think. (We’re not talking about punchups here.) And strange as it may seem, heated arguments can indicate that a team is making progress.

“All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow.”
Patrick Lencioni

Recently we’ve been working with a couple of newly formed teams from different institutions. They do different kinds of work at different levels of seniority. One has been set up from scratch to support a new strategy. The other is from an established unit, but was recently restructured and has a new team lead and newly promoted deputies.

These teams are doing very different work but they both have something in common. They are both going through the same stages of evolution on their way to being high performing teams – which is one that’s really good at making decisions, getting things done and, crucially, making space to reflect.

To be a high performing team can take a while and takes work.

Stages of team development

In the early stages of a team, when everyone is being a bit coy and polite, when people hold back from saying what they really think and feel as they size each other up, people behave with caution and civility.

The group development models made famous by researchers such as Tuckman, Agazarian and Wheelan describe this as the forming or flight stage.

The models show – and we see this playing out – even after a few weeks or months when groups have got to know each other better, they often still shy away from conflict or direct disagreement.

But then the cracks start to appear. Undisclosed frustrations about progress with projects, perceived slights or even seemingly innocuous things like the way meetings are always task focussed, start to bubble up and break out in fights and other ways that people find alarming.

Whilst some team members get stuck in, others decide to ‘withdraw’. Perhaps no one shows any interest in their area, or they are regularly interrupted or sidelined. They might complain that no one listens to them, but probably not to the people involved.

These behaviours indicate the team has moved on from forming to the storming or fight stage.

Fight is a precursor to better collaboration

Both of these stages of a team – forming and storming – are really normal. And are actually precursors to better collaboration and higher performance, because before those can happen, the team needs to resolve how to best work with one another more effectively. Once resolved people know where they stand, and what the boundaries are. There is trust, respect and confidence that they can deal with the tricky stuff that comes up.

Getting to this, it turns out, is really hard.

Before then conflict can come about through things we think of as ‘below the waterline’. Your anger for example, might be triggered by something seemingly banal – say a comment about you using the photocopier too much. How do you bring that up in a professional context without sounding like an idiot? Yet your anger is real, the emotional flooding just as debilitating and distracting, as if something far more serious was happening. And not dealing with it or the myriad of equivalents has consequences.

Perhaps this is something you are experiencing, or you have in the past?

The problem is that most of us feel ill-equipped to deal with the fight or conflict. So we shy away from it. Paper over it. Yet time and again research has shown that groups do better when they can move through these phases of development, otherwise they get stuck there.

Being in a team stuck between forming and storming is exhausting and demoralising. Work still gets done, but probably no one is having a good time. And what’s achieved is only ever a fraction of the potential. Being stuck in that place drives people to leave, or to burnout.

In our work with newly formed groups, we reassure them that it’s inevitable for people working together to experience these flight/fight situations.

Forewarned is forearmed. Knowing which stage you are in can help you think about your ability to change things, and your own responses.

That’s usually where we focus our work.

A tool for working with conflict

To help teams with this, we’ve been using a tool called Shield, a process that helps you firstly identify what triggers you, and then work through your feelings and responses so that you can reach a new way of being together.
Working with the tool builds trust because it requires a little bit of vulnerability and risk taking. You have to admit that you get triggered. You are encouraged to work together to understand what’s really driving your response.

By using this tool (and others like it) to have more open conversations about what is going on, groups can get through the flight and fight stages more easily and with less psychological damage. The tool doesn’t fix things, but it is a way of practising a different way of communicating. And practice makes better.

For example, say you’re in a meeting and someone says or does something – it triggers you and suddenly you feel really uncomfortable. Maybe nobody listened to a word you said, or others were arguing and it all got really tense. Worse, this happens every time you have a meeting.

Working with Shield

Shield is a neat way to help you explore your responses so they don’t control you, and you don’t get stuck there. It has seven steps that you work though on your own and then with a peer, before swapping notes in your group:

1. The trigger
   Get clear on what it is that sets you off.

 

2. Thoughts
   What thoughts come up when you’re triggered? There’s normally a cascade of them, a mix of self-doubt and frustration such as: “I hate this,” or “They think I’m useless”.

 

3. Emotions
   Can you identify the associated feelings? Often it’s anger, perhaps tinged with sadness and fear.

 

4. Behaviours
   When you feel like that, do you become snippy or passive aggressive? Do you withdraw completely and shut down? Do you pretend everything is okay?

 

5. Consequences
   There are consequences to being snippy or ‘checking out’: others may react by being snippy back, or if you withdraw then neither you nor the group can explore your perspective. Either way it becomes a dissatisfying experience.

 

6. Needs
   If your behaviour has consequences, you can work to stop them happening by first understanding your need. An example might be your need to “feel valued and respected by my colleagues and when people don’t listen to me, I don’t feel either of those things, which is why I get so triggered.”

 

7. Support
   What would help you in these scenarios? You could take a deep breath and choose to manage your response. What might help even more is if other people notice you’re not speaking or are being snippy, and they say, “Steve, you’re being quiet (or aggressive). Are you alright?” Then you can have an honest conversation about what is happening.

Partly the Shield exercise is about getting to know each other’s triggers and default responses, and partly it’s about recognising that those default responses are typical of ‘fight’ stage behaviours.

Without this awareness, if in a moment of conflict you respond in your default dysfunctional ways – ie you get aggressive, interrupt people, withdraw or complain – none of those will move the group on to collaborate better. In fact those responses probably trigger others around you in dysfunctional ways too.

However if you can recognise that you’re triggering each other into negative feedback loops, then you can do something about it. Knowing you are at the fight stage helps you get through it.

In a team, it’s all about how you interact with each other. The way people are with you plays a huge part in defining how you feel about yourself and your work. That means even if your team is not high performing, you can still interact in ways that are constructive and useful.

The question is how do you develop a shared language for talking about the things that frustrate you. Because if you can do that, you can get to real collaboration faster.

If you are experiencing these kinds of issues in your team and you’d like more information on Shield, or help with using it, please get in touch.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The scary truth is: every team needs to fight appeared first on ThenSomehow.

What we see in our work is that management capability isn’t something people either have or don’t have — it is a collection of repeatable practices. So we’ve included a carefully curated list of tools, exercises and methods to help you lead more effectively, enhance collaboration and work smarter not harder.

From delegation to communication, meetings to mindset, these tools can help you foster a culture of growth, empowerment, and performance within your team and organisation.

These simple practices can amplify your effectiveness and revolutionise the way you lead and manage.

Part 1: Managing Personal Productivity and Time

1. How can managers build productivity habits that last?

What we often see in our work is that productivity tactics rarely stick because people are easily overwhelmed by the speed and volume of day-to-day demands. There’s tons of productivity advice out there, and you’ve probably tried a lot of it – but how much of it actually sticks? Here are a few of our top productivity tips to help you work smarter not harder, that are straightforward to implement and make a real difference:

• Batch your emails: Work on email at predetermined slots rather than leaving your inbox open all day.
• Start your day from your calendar, not your inbox: Taking just a few seconds to pause and reflect before looking at email completely changes the trajectory of your day.
• Plan your work before doing it: Block out a weekly review in your calendar—time spent thinking and planning is just as important as time spent doing.

For a deeper look at productivity workflows that stick, read our full breakdown of six productivity tips that work and last.

2. How to prioritise tasks when everything feels urgent

When organisational pressure builds, everything starts to look like a top priority. This creates a bottleneck where teams can get stuck, unsure of where to focus their energy or what to do next. The Impact Effort Matrix is a simple tool that helps you and your team sort through the noise, map out your workload, and align on what actually matters most.

Here is how you can use the matrix to get clarity and categorise and prioritise your tasks:

• Focus on quick wins: Identify the tasks that offer high impact for low effort. Clearing these first builds immediate momentum for the team.
• Only schedule one or two bigger projects: Keep a small number of high-impact but high-effort initiatives active at any one time, as they require significant long-term effort and focus.
• Filter out thankless tasks: If you can stop low-impact, high-effort tasks, it frees up the capacity needed to focus on your high-impact projects instead.

For a practical guide on how to run this exercise with your team, read our full breakdown of how to prioritise using the Impact Effort Matrix.

Part 2: Protecting your time

3. How can you reduce the time spent in unnecessary meetings?

When calendars become overloaded, your team’s capacity to do the work shrinks. It is easy for an organisation to default to scheduling a meeting for every conversation, but this endless cycle directly impacts productivity and leaves people with no time left for the work that matters. Breaking this pattern requires shifting the expectation around how updates are shared and how decisions get made.

Here are a few practical ways to start reclaiming your calendar:

• Do not go to meetings: Delegate someone else to go instead. This frees up your schedule while giving team members an opportunity to step up and take ownership.
• Try 20- or 50-minute meetings: Shorten your default meeting times by shifting standard 60-minute blocks to 50 minutes, and 30-minute catch-ups to 20 minutes. This immediately builds essential breathing room and transition time into your day.
• Establish a clear purpose upfront: Decline or challenge invitations that do not have a defined objective or agenda. If you are only required to listen to information rather than contribute to a decision, ask for the meeting notes afterward instead of attending.

For a comprehensive guide on how to free up your schedule, read our full breakdown of eight ways to cut down on meetings.

4. How to handle constant workplace interruptions

Interruptions are a reality of organisational life and stand out as one of the biggest challenges managers face. When your day is fragmented by ad-hoc queries, it breaks your focus, causes decision fatigue, and leaves you feeling completely reactive. Protecting your time isn’t about shutting your team out, it is about creating clear, predictable boundaries so you can actually get your own work done.

Here are a few practical ways to stay focused and manage daily disruptions:

• Mark in your calendar when you’re not available: Let your phone go to voicemail, don’t look at emails, and set your Teams or Slack to show you’re busy. Crucially, negotiate with your team beforehand on how they can contact you if a genuine emergency arises.
• Work away from your desk: Go and sit somewhere else where you can’t be easily found. This is particularly relevant when you are office-based, but if you are working remotely, it can mean moving to a café or a library to get away from digital noise.
• Batch the questions: Encourage your team to gather their non-urgent points and bring them to your scheduled 1-on-1 meetings, rather than escalating every thought the moment it occurs.

To help you regain control of your schedule, read our 4 simple things you can do to overcome interruptions.

Part 3: Managing and empowering your team

5. How managers can get better at delegating

Delegation is a fundamental management skill, yet it is often where communication breaks down, leading to frustrating micromanagement or project delays. When tasks are handed over with vague parameters, teams struggle to move forward because they lack the clarity needed to take full ownership. To prevent this, we use a simple alignment tool called CPORT, it’s a framework to clarify expectations and uncover critical steps and risks before any work begins.

When assigning work, ensure you and your team members have explicitly discussed these five dimensions:

• Context: Why is this work being done right now?
• Purpose: What is the objective of the project?
• Outcomes: What does a successful outcome look like?
• Resources: What tools, budget, or support are needed?
• Time: What are the milestone check-ins and final deadlines?

For a full breakdown of this technique – including common pitfalls, critical questions and real-world examples – read our full guide to how to use CPORT to delegate to your team.

6. What three questions should every manager ask to build staff engagement?

Genuine staff engagement is built on clarity, but many teams operate with an underlying sense of uncertainty about where they stand. If your team members cannot easily answer basic questions about their role and performance, they run the risk of professional drift. When money is the only clear measure people have for how they are doing, it creates a systemic risk for your organisation.

To check alignment and build motivation, ensure your team can confidently answer these three foundational questions:

• What is expected of me? Clear expectations stop people from guessing what their priorities should be.
• How am I doing? Feedback helps people understand their progress and feel recognised.
• Where am I going? Knowing this helps people have direction and purpose.

If you want to test this out with your own team, read our full guide on the three powerful questions that build staff engagement.

Part 4: Improving communication makes you a more effective manager

7. How to make sure people hear what you say

It is easy to assume that because a message has been delivered, it has been fully understood. Miscommunication and misunderstanding is remarkably common within busy organisations, and simply passing on information does not mean it has been absorbed. When instructions are filtered through different team priorities and pressures, the core message can easily get lost. Introducing a simple habit like the Replay tool can change this, ensuring everyone is genuinely aligned before a conversation ends.

To run a Replay exercise yourself with your own team, follow these steps:

• Share your message or plan clearly: Present the information, context, or change to your team concisely.
• Break into small groups: Split the team into small breakout groups and give them 5–10 minutes to discuss and replay to each other what they just heard you say.
• Have each group share back: Have each group play their understanding back to the room so that the team can self-correct and you can clarify any immediate misunderstandings together.

For a comprehensive guide on running this exercise, read our full breakdown of how to use Replay and make sure people hear what you say.

8. How to turn frustrating team discussions into productive conversations

Despite how much time you spend in meetings or how many plans you make, it can still be incredibly hard to get everyone onto the same page and make things happen. Better conversations naturally lead to better actions, but teams often default to unspoken assumptions rather than clear communication. Introducing low-stakes, structured tools can help convey meaning and surface different opinions safely.

Here are three tools you can use to structure more productive team discussions:

• Team Canvas: A collaborative framework used to align your team on shared values, clear individual roles, and expected project outputs.
• Expressive Drivers: A light communication framework that helps team members identify their conversational preferences and build mutual empathy.
• Planning Poker: A quick, playful technique to surface hidden disagreements by encouraging everyone to share and explore conflicting project timelines or expectations simultaneously.

To see how to facilitate these exercises with your own group, read our full breakdown of four tools for better conversations with your team.

9. How to stop avoiding difficult conversations

Putting off awkward conversations and ignoring performance or behavioural issues hoping they will magically resolve themselves usually makes matters worse. While avoiding conflict might seem like an easy way out, it quickly hampers your team’s ability to grow, blocks decision-making, and quietly erodes trust. When addressed directly and with empathy, these challenging discussions become the exact points where clarity and real progress are unlocked.

Here is a step-by-step framework you can use to handle these discussions constructively:

• Confront the issue directly: Face the situation head-on rather than delaying. Putting it off only prolongs the problem and increases anxiety, whereas addressing it quickly prevents unhelpful patterns from becoming entrenched.
• Use ‘I’ statements: Structure what you say by using the format: “I feel X when you do Y, and [how it affects the work]”. This allows you to express your perspective truthfully and clearly without causing the other person to become immediately defensive.
• Use the FONT to balance the conversation: Observe the conversation through four categories Feelings, Opinions, Needs, and Thoughts. If someone becomes highly emotional, ground the conversation by pointing to the objective facts; if they bombard you with purely defensive facts and figures, shift the dynamic by asking how they feel about the situation.

To learn how to navigate these sensitive conversations with more confidence, read our full manager’s guide on how to master difficult conversations with confidence and compassion.

10. How to give and receive feedback that actually makes a difference

Giving and receiving staff feedback can be a daunting, awkward task, yet it is a vital catalyst for personal development and growth. Too many people have had unhelpful, anxiety-inducing experiences with feedback, often because it is reduced to cold performance metrics or saved for an annual review. Shifting this requires treating feedback as a safe, qualitative development tool rather than a punitive measurement exercise.

To ensure feedback conversations actually drive progress, look to break these three common unhelpful patterns:

• Don’t save feedback for the annual review: Saving up observations for a single, high-stakes meeting once a year creates intense anxiety and focuses entirely on the past. Little and often is much better than feedback once a year.
• Don’t make it about the person: If there is a problem with someone, being specific can be really helpful. But make it about the behaviour, not the person. The behaviour is the problem, not ‘you’re the problem’.
• Don’t criticise people in public: It’s good to occasionally praise people in public, it’s never good to criticise people in public. It’s humiliating and they will hide mistakes in future.

To discover a framework that makes development conversations much more meaningful, explore 360 feedback as an option for feedback that gathers a balanced, whole-group perspective rather than relying on a single person’s point of view.

Part 5: Essential tools for building mindset, agency and performance

11. How to help your team overcome a feeling of powerlessness

When teams face complex challenges or unwieldy bureaucracy, it is easy for a sense of powerlessness to set in. This lack of agency drives collective anxiety and leaves people feeling stuck. Using the Circles of Influence framework – developed by management guru Stephen Covey – helps teams shift out of a stuck mindset, map out their challenges objectively, and realise that they almost always have more options than they think.

Here is how you can use the Circles of Influence exercise to build resilience and find a proactive path forward:

• Map your Circle of Concern: Have your team write down all their current anxieties, blockers, and challenges onto individual sticky notes. The task is to realise which of these things are inside and which outside of your control, and work on the things that you can.
• Identify the Circle of Control: Draw a smaller circle in the absolute centre and move the sticky notes that the team can actively and directly control into it. This brings immediate, comforting clarity to what is genuinely within people’s power to fix.
• Expand your Circle of Influence: Get team members to look at the ways they could influence some of the things that they feel are out of their control. Go through all the notes that are in the Circle of Concern and together try to move them into the Circle of Influence. Brainstorm small, actionable steps to influence other stakeholders and gradually pull those concerns into your inner circles.

To help your team build a more proactive mindset and reduce workplace anxiety, read our full guide on how to unlock your team’s potential using Circles of Influence.

12. How to boost your team’s performance

If all the attention is focused solely on problem processes and not enough on how you relate to each other, nothing will really change. Inspired by Olympic rowing strategies, “Make the Boat Go Faster” is a simple visual tool designed to help teams map out what is holding them back and figure out what they can do about it. The true value of the exercise is that it creates the right conditions to move past superficial process complaints and have deeper, honest conversations about your actual team dynamics. Inspired by Olympic gold medalist Ben Hunt-Davis, it’s a way to identify what’s holding your team back, and how to overcome that.

Here is how you can facilitate this exercise with your team:

• Map out your wind, and anchors: Draw a picture of a boat on a wall to represent your team or organisation. Have everyone write their thoughts on sticky notes and place them on the drawing: things that fill the sails and drive you forward go at the top (the wind), while things holding you back go at the bottom (the anchors).
• Reduce the drag and maximise propulsion: Open up a collective conversation about how the team can actively “cut the anchors off” and make the most of the wind. Use this stage to guide the team away from external, unfixable issues and focus on what they can directly change or influence together.
• Discuss the deeper dynamics: Use the notes as a starting point to unpick what people really mean by process complaints. Actively move the conversation through distinct layers—shifting from basic system and resource issues, up to how you function as a group, and finally to how you connect with each other emotionally.

For a step-by-step guide on how to run this exercise with your own group, read our full breakdown of how to use ‘Make Your Boat Go Faster’ to improve team performance.
 

Final thoughts on being an effective manager: lead smarter, not harder

By adopting the strategies, insights, and tools outlined here, you’ll be equipped to navigate the complexities of leadership, with confidence.

Remember, being an effective manager is not just about optimizing processes and achieving targets; it’s about fostering a culture of growth, empowerment, and collaboration.

As you continue to refine your skills, never underestimate the impact of empathy, continuous learning, and adaptability. Embrace the challenges, celebrate the victories, and keep pushing the boundaries of your leadership capabilities. The road ahead is rich with possibilities, and the tools we have outlined here will help to steer your team and organisation towards a future of sustained success.

Developing your management practice:

• For Higher Education Leaders: Swap notes on management challenges and leadership approaches in our monthly online peer support group: Register for the next peer support call.
• For Leadership Teams: Want to develop manager capabilities, build emotional literacy, or shift culture across your organisation? Get in touch with ThenSomehow.
• Free Tools & Next Steps: Try our free 360 feedback tool AdviceSheet or read our deep-dive guide on How to delegate using CPORT.

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