Before You Coach the Person, Inspect the System
Recurring friction may be a signal that ownership, boundaries and decision rights are poorly designed.
Why good people keep clashing at work
YouTubeThis article is inspired by real leadership coaching conversations. All identifying details, including names, genders, roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context, have been removed, generalised or combined to protect privacy. Any transcript excerpts have been edited for clarity and anonymity while preserving the underlying leadership lesson.
The familiar diagnosis
A conversation recently started in a very familiar place: frustration with how people were working together.
There was friction. Responsibilities were starting to overlap. One person was challenging decisions, another was trying to protect ownership, and it would have been very easy to turn the entire discussion into a coaching conversation about behaviour. Who needs to communicate better? Who needs to be more collaborative? Who is being too difficult? Who needs to soften their approach?
Those questions are not always wrong. Sometimes the problem really is behaviour. But the longer we spoke, the less satisfied I was with that explanation.
At one point I asked, in slightly cleaned-up wording:
"Are we solving for a bad attitude, or are we actually solving for a gap in how the work is designed?"
Looking at the work
That question changed the direction of the conversation because we stopped talking about the people for a moment and looked at the work itself. Who actually owned the outcome? Who had the authority to make the decision? Where did one person's responsibility stop and another person's begin? When somebody disagreed, were they supposed to advise, challenge, escalate, or decide?
Once we started pulling those threads apart, the interpersonal problem looked different. The people involved were not necessarily behaving irrationally. They were responding to an environment where the boundaries were unclear and where multiple capable people had enough responsibility to feel accountable, but not enough clarity to know where that accountability ended.
That distinction matters to me because repeated friction is information. One disagreement can absolutely be a relationship problem. But when the same type of disagreement keeps appearing, especially around the same work, I think leaders have a responsibility to ask whether the system is manufacturing the conflict.
Strong people can hide weak systems for a surprisingly long time. When ownership is unclear, they chase things. When a decision has not been made, they move it forward. When a process breaks, they create a workaround. When something falls between roles, they pick it up. The work gets done, so from a distance the operating model can look fine.
It is only later, when the same people start frustrating each other, that we notice the cost. By then it is tempting to label the tension as attitude or communication style, even though the behaviour may have been a rational response to ambiguity all along.
Challenge and ownership
There was another part of the conversation that I did not want to lose, because fixing the system does not mean removing personal responsibility. Someone was concerned about pushing too hard, challenging decisions, and occasionally making people uncomfortable. My response, again slightly edited for anonymity, was:
"Did you become a leader just to follow instructions?"
I still believe that. Leadership requires judgement. If something does not make sense, I want people to say so. If a timeline looks unrealistic, challenge it. If the evidence is weak, ask for better evidence. If a decision creates a risk that others have missed, surface it. An organisation where everybody politely executes instructions can look wonderfully aligned while actually being intellectually very quiet.
But the conversation also reminded me that challenge and ownership are not the same thing. You can strongly disagree with a decision without needing to take the decision away from the person who owns it. You can say, "I do not think this is the right approach, and here is why," while still recognising that someone else is accountable for the final call.
That is a subtle leadership skill because it requires maturity on both sides. The person making the decision has to tolerate challenge without treating it as disloyalty. The person challenging has to know when their role changes from influencing the decision to supporting the outcome. If either side misses that distinction, every disagreement becomes a question of authority, and soon everyone is involved while nobody is quite sure who is accountable.
For the person I was coaching, the takeaway was not to become less direct. I did not want to coach the challenge out of them. I wanted the challenge to become more deliberate. Push on the thinking, the evidence, the assumption or the risk. Then get very clear on where the decision lives.
What I need to examine
The learning for me was more uncomfortable. I noticed how quickly even experienced leaders can personalise dysfunction. Somebody is frustrated, so we coach their attitude. Somebody is pushing too hard, so we coach their style. Somebody is resisting a decision, so we coach their collaboration. Those explanations are attractive because they give us a person to fix.
But what if the behaviour is partly a consequence of the environment we created?
That does not remove accountability for how people behave. A badly designed system is not permission to treat colleagues poorly. But it changes the order in which I want to diagnose the problem. Before I ask, "What does this person need to change?", I want to ask, "What is the environment repeatedly asking this person to compensate for?"
That is the piece I want to carry forward. When the same friction returns, I want to inspect the structure before defaulting to behavioural coaching. Who owns the outcome? Who has the decision right? What happens when people disagree? Where is the escalation route? Are we asking two people to be accountable for the same thing without ever saying it out loud?
Sometimes the right answer will still be a difficult coaching conversation. But I do not want coaching to become a way of making good people more tolerant of badly designed work.
If the system is creating the collision, then part of leadership is fixing the road, not only teaching people to become better at crashing into each other.
