How to Make Your Team Suck

(A deliberately sarcastic essay about leadership, power, and self-deception)

This piece is written with a bit of bite. That’s intentional. Not because leaders are bad or foolish, but because many of the most damaging leadership dynamics don’t come from malice – they come from unexamined assumptions we carry quietly, often unconsciously. 

If you want to make your team underperform, start by assembling an all-star lineup. Hire the most seasoned, insightful leaders you can find. Balance them with early-career, fast-learning, ambitious talent. Make sure the resumes are impeccable and the potential obvious. Then – this is the key – quietly carry a worldview that says, everyone is an idiot.

Don’t announce it. Just live inside it. Let it hum beneath every meeting, every question, every pause.

Often this story is earned honestly, formed early in life, reinforced by moments of being dismissed, misunderstood, or surrounded by chaos. It may even coexist with its mirror image: I’m the smartest one here… and I’m probably an idiot too. Held deeply enough, this story becomes energetic fact, not belief – and energy, as it turns out, is contagious.

What happens next is almost predictable. Collaboration evaporates. People stop thinking out loud. Curiosity gives way to caution. A team that should be bold and inventive slides into self-protection. Call it survival mode, fight-or-flight, or simply the absence of psychological safety – the label doesn’t matter. What matters is the outcome: A player quietly performing at a B-minus level.

And then comes the reinforcement. Pressure increases. Criticism sharpens. Frustration leaks out. Somewhere along the way, the hope appears that squeezing harder will produce excellence. It never does. It only confirms the original story: See? They really are idiots.

The most interesting part is what never gets examined. Not the talent. Not the strategy. Not the structure.

What goes unexamined is the possibility that the leader is far more powerful than they realize. That the internal state – the story being lived inside – might be expressing itself directly as external performance. That the way one moves through the world, listens, interrupts, doubts, tightens, or dismisses is not neutral. It is formative.

So if results are disappointing, here’s the provocation: stop looking outward first. Especially when a direct report is underperforming. Even more so when an entire team or organization is falling short. 

The most leverage is rarely found in fixing them. It lives in examining you.

What assumptions are you carrying about people? What story are you transmitting – without words – about competence, trust, and worth?

Leaders shape outcomes not just through decisions, but through presence. Change the inner climate, and performance often follows. Ignore it, and even the best teams will quietly, efficiently, and predictably… suck.

Which, of course, is not a moral failure – just a systems issue with a surprisingly personal root.

The work is noticing it. The work is staying curious instead of certain. The work is being willing to examine yourself with the same rigor you apply to everyone else.

If you’re a leader who suspects your presence may be shaping outcomes more than your strategy – and you want a space to explore that honestly – this is the kind of inquiry we practice every day inside our Coaching Collective. No fixing. No shaming. Just real examination, together.