Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team
Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Colonna's diagnosis of why teams fail: rarely a lack of talent, strategy, or execution, and almost always the unresolved psychological patterns — especially the most powerful person's — that the group unconsciously re-enacts. Groups become foils for members to replay their family-of-origin dynamics. The fix is to name the repeating pattern out loud (make the unconscious conscious) and, above all, for the leader to do their own inner work.
Origin
Jerry Colonna's executive-team coaching practice, invoking Carl Jung ('until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate') and Parker Palmer.
Core principles
- 01Team failure is usually the leader's unsorted baggage, not a skills or strategy gap
- 02Groups unconsciously recreate family-of-origin patterns and then blame a scapegoat
- 03Until a pattern is made conscious, the group repeats it and calls it fate
- 04The more power you hold, the more moral responsibility you have to do your own work
How to run it
- 1
Stop blaming talent, strategy, and execution
When a team is failing, resist the reflex to attribute it to lack of talent, strategy, or execution. Look instead for unresolved individual and group psychology.
Watch out If you keep blaming an individual in the group, that itself is the sign an unconscious pattern is running the team.
- 2
Observe the repeating pattern before naming it
Watch the group dynamics until you've seen a pattern recur — Colonna waited to observe it 'once, twice, three times' before speaking.
Pro tip Look for the classic roles: the scapegoat and the truth-teller emerge in nearly every group.
- 3
Name the pattern out loud
Make the unconscious conscious by describing exactly what you see, e.g. 'every time we get close to something painful, somebody makes a joke, everyone laughs, and the energy disappears.'
- 4
Have the most powerful person do their work
Because the group manifests the dysfunction of whoever holds the most power, that person must do their own radical self-inquiry first — if they refuse, the whole group stays a manifestation of their early dysfunction.
Pro tip For the lower-power member: ask 'what draws me to this position?' and 'how have I benefited from the dysfunction?'
Watch out Parker Palmer's rule: if you choose to live an unexamined life, don't take a job that involves other people.
In the wild
In an executive-team meeting for a famous software blogger's company, Colonna noticed that every time the group neared something painful, someone made a joke and the energy vanished. When he named it, the CEO said, 'Jesus Christ, that's just like my family.'
→ The CEO recognized the team was replaying his family-of-origin pattern, making the previously invisible dynamic available to change.
A CEO of a 15-person company complained no one could decide without her; Colonna established she'd hired them and felt 'furious' when they decided against her wishes. Her intolerance was recreating the dependence she resented.
→ Named as her growth edge — to scale a leadership team she must tolerate people making boneheaded decisions about things she cares about.
Common mistakes
Scapegoating instead of examining the pattern
Blaming a particular team member for the dysfunction lets the unconscious group pattern keep running; Jung's warning is that unexamined patterns direct your life and you call it fate.
A powerful leader refusing to do their own work
If the highest-power person won't examine themselves, the entire group becomes a manifestation of that individual's early dysfunction — no amount of team-level fixing compensates for it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and senior leaders of a struggling team who have already tried talent, strategy, and process fixes without result
Not ideal for
A team whose problems are genuinely and narrowly operational (e.g. a broken process or missing skill) with no interpersonal or leadership dynamic in play
From the transcript
“it's the unresolved I'll be dramatic with the language demons from their childhood. It's the unsorted baggage.”
“Carl Jung once said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."”
“every time we get close to talking about something that's really painful painful. Somebody makes a joke and all the energy disappears”
“if you want to create a high functioning team, do your work. And it starts with the person who has the most power in the…”
“the more power you have, the more moral responsibility you have to actually pause and figure out what it is that you're doing to be…”
From the episode
How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?
Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC)