If you lead an informal group, a leadership team, or a growing business, there’s still a good chance you understand your numbers far better than you understand what’s really happening between your people.
Not the organisation chart, not the financials, but the messy human stuff: behaviour, culture, mindset, conflict, motivation and perception.
For many leaders, this part of organisational life feels mysterious: something you either get lucky with (you recruit the right people) or you exhaust yourself managing (you keep fixing things as they break).
If any of these thoughts feel familiar, you’re not alone:
- “Nobody shows any initiative – it’s like managing a bunch of children.”
- “Why can’t I get people to do what I want them to do?”
- “Unless I keep a close eye on them, they don’t behave in line with our values.”
- “I bend over backwards for people, yet they still complain.”
What’s missing here isn’t effort or good intentions. It’s a way of understanding how organisations actually work.
Once you have that, leadership becomes far less reactive – and far more effective.
Four levels at which organisations operate
Most people problems can be looked at through four different lenses. The mistake many leaders make is getting stuck in the first two.
Level 1: The individual
At this level, issues are seen as residing in people.
It’s about personality, attitude, competence or motivation. The language often sounds like blame, even when it’s well-intentioned:
“They’re not up to it.” “She’s difficult.” “He just doesn’t get it.”
The typical response is coaching, feedback, performance management or, in extreme cases, moving the person on.
Sometimes this is appropriate. But it’s rarely the whole picture.
Level 2: Relationships
Here the focus shifts to how people interact.
You might look at communication styles, misunderstandings, or lack of awareness of impact on others. This can be helpful, but it still keeps the spotlight firmly on individuals.
Levels 1 and 2 are where most organisations stay. And they’re useful – up to a point.
But they don’t explain why capable, reasonable people so often behave oddly once they’re part of a group.
Level 3: The team as a system
This is where things get interesting.
At this level, you see the team as a whole – a system with its own patterns, habits and unspoken rules. Behaviour can’t be explained purely by personality, because the group itself shapes how people act.
Teams generate powerful forces: belonging, status anxiety, loyalty, fear, energy, competition. People adapt in ways that help them survive in the group, even if those behaviours aren’t helpful for the organisation.
That’s why dealing with team issues one person at a time so often fails.
In my work, when issues arise in a team, I always insist on working with the whole team, leader included. Because that’s where the behaviour is created – and that’s where it has to be addressed.
Level 4: The organisation
At the widest level, team behaviour often mirrors what’s happening in the organisation as a whole.
Change, uncertainty, pressure from the top, unclear strategy, mixed messages about accountability – all of these show up in how people behave day to day.
This is why leadership behaviour matters so much. What you tolerate, model or avoid dealing with doesn’t stay at the top. It gets replicated everywhere.
If senior leaders are anxious, controlling or inconsistent, that becomes the culture.
So what does this mean for you as a leader?
A few practical shifts make a huge difference:
- Notice when you’re blaming individuals for problems that may be systemic.
- When a team is struggling, ask: what’s going on in the team as a whole?
- Encourage collective responsibility rather than quiet resentment or scapegoating.
- Look honestly at your own role in the dynamics you’re seeing.
- Take responsibility for shaping the system, not just managing the people in it.
How you frame a problem largely determines how well – and how durably – it gets resolved.
When leaders learn to work at Levels 3 and 4, organisations become calmer, clearer and far more capable of dealing with complexity.
And your leadership stops feeling like constant firefighting.