Why Smart Teams Get Stuck: The Hidden Assumptions That Shape Performance
Same team, different realities: why teams get stuck – and how they get unstuck
“She’s trying to take over my job.”
“He’s putting me under pressure because he doesn’t like me. He wants to see me fail.”
Sentences like these are familiar to anyone who works with teams. They’re rarely said out loud in a meeting. But they shape every meeting.
We each build our own reality
Human beings need each other. A team at MIT found that a few hours of social isolation triggers a craving response in the brain similar to going without food. And yet our interactions with each other are rarely smooth. They’re full of misunderstandings, misinterpretations and the cognitive biases none of us escape.
Part of the reason is simple, and constructivists like Paul Watzlawick spent a career exploring it: we don’t experience the world as it is. We take in what our senses give us, assign meaning, value and order to it, and in doing so we build our own version of reality. That version depends on our life experience, our patterns of thought and our cultural background. So two people can sit through the same meeting and leave with two different stories about what happened.
When individual realities harden into team beliefs
In a team, these stories don’t stay individual for long. Our need to belong pulls us towards the people who see things the way we do, and a shared interpretation quickly becomes a shared belief. Perceptions trigger reactions, reactions trigger new perceptions, and the team ends up in a loop that feeds itself.
That’s when you start to hear:
“I need to protect my commission, so I’ll stop my colleagues from accessing my client information.”
“We’re really struggling with all these young people joining the company. They’re lazy, entitled and, to make matters worse, they’re all suffering from burnout.”
And the behaviours follow: information held back, communication reduced to the bare minimum, avoidance, excessive control. No one set out to create this. But no one can see a way out of it either.
Where culture comes in
In international teams, culture adds another layer, and it’s one people rarely name.
Picture a project meeting. A French manager challenges a proposal head-on, debates it vigorously and pushes back hard. For him, that’s engagement: you only argue about ideas you take seriously. His British colleague hears an attack. Later, she responds to one of his suggestions with “That’s an interesting idea – perhaps worth considering at some point.” He takes it as a yes. She meant no.
Neither of them is wrong. Each is reading the other through their own cultural lens. But by the end of the quarter, he thinks she’s evasive and she thinks he’s aggressive. And their teams have started to think so too.
What a team coach actually does
A team coach acts as a mirror. The first step is making these patterns visible: the loops, the assumptions, the stories the team tells itself about itself. Once a team can see the pattern, it can start to question it.
The coach then helps the team step out of the impasse it has created. That means challenging assumptions and offering alternative interpretations, tentatively rather than as a verdict (“Perhaps what you’re seeing is…”). And then, together, it means finding new ways of working that the whole team can own.
The aim is healthier, more constructive ways of working together, which matter as much for each person’s well-being and engagement as for the team’s results.
Why this matters now
Team coaching has long been more established in English-speaking countries and Germany than in France. That’s changing. More and more French organisations are bringing in coaches to strengthen collaboration, support leadership development and help teams through transitions, not only to fix problems once they’ve appeared.
The pressure on leaders and teams hasn’t eased. Change is constant, burnout remains a reality, and organisations that want to last have to take human needs as seriously as performance. Helping teams see the realities they’ve built – and build better ones together – is where coaching makes a difference.
If any of this sounds familiar in your own team, I’d be glad to talk it through. I offer a free 30-minute discovery call. Just drop me a line.
