Trust at the top rarely repairs itself

By Sandra Oliver, Impact Founder

In our last insight, we looked at why increased tension in small, senior teams can be painful for leaders and have a negative impact on the whole organization. Why it’s a good idea to think about small, senior teams in the context of Family Systems Theory. And how teams like these can use structure and boundaries to get out of challenging patterns.

Today, we’ll look at the critical steps we need to take to rebuild trust and improve the leadership team dynamic, so we can get back to serving the organization in the best way possible.

Start by looking inward

When a small, senior team is in a painful pattern, it’s tempting to bring everyone into a room and try to fix it quickly. If the dynamic is too charged, however, bringing people together too soon can intensify the pattern. People arrive ready to defend, make their case, and listen for blame. They try to win the room or they shut down.

Before the group work, there’s often important individual work for each of us to do including understanding our own part in the system. To start, we can look inward and ask questions, like:

• What triggers us?
• What story are we telling about the other person?
• What are we afraid of?
• What do we want?
• What are we willing to change?
• What are we not willing to change?
• What does the firm need from us now?

Attaining this kind of insight helps us become more thoughtful and less reactive before we try to repair the working relationship. Then, when we do come together as a team, the conversation can be more grounded, focusing less on blame and more on agreements, decision-making, behaviour, and the future.

Be honest about the pain

These challenging situations are not just “team dynamics”. They can feel deeply personal. A partner may feel betrayed by someone they built the firm with. A founder, displaced. A successor, undermined. A long-time colleague, unseen.

Someone may believe they’ve carried more than their share. Someone else might feel controlled, judged, or excluded. People may experience grief for the relationship they thought they had, the trust that’s been lost, or a version of the firm that no longer exists.

If we ignore these feelings and beliefs, we miss something important. Senior leaders are still human beings.

We may be highly capable, but that doesn’t make us immune to hurt, fear, defensiveness, or loneliness. In fact, the more senior we are, the fewer places we often have to acknowledge, and speak openly and honestly about these feelings.

And we need to treat these situations with seriousness and care. That means no public shaming, diagnosing people in the room, forcing artificial vulnerability, pretending the business issue is separate from the relationship issue (when everyone knows it isn’t), or letting pain justify poor behaviour.

Rethink relationship goals

 We also have to remember that in difficult senior dynamics, the win isn’t always a perfect relationship. Sometimes it’s that:

• People stop avoiding the real issue.
• Meetings become more honest and less performative.
• Decisions are clearer.
• One person stops over-functioning and another starts taking more responsibility.
• People stop pulling others into the conflict.
• Partners can lead together respectfully, even if the relationship is not close.

These goals may sound modest, but in a small, senior team, they can change everything. Everyone stops managing around the tension, and energy goes back into the business. And often, over time, the leadership team relationships improve because they create enough trust, structure, and honesty for something better to emerge.

Three questions to ask before the next hard conversation

When managing a difficult dynamic in a small, senior team, pause before the next conversation and ask:

• What relationship do we actually need in order to lead well?
• What pattern are we caught in, and how am I contributing to it?
• What structure, agreement, or boundary would help us behave differently while we’re rebuilding trust?

These questions won’t make the situation easy, but they can help us move out of blame and into responsibility. So everyone stops reacting to old patterns and starts creating better ones.