The Fish Starts Rotting at the Head
David Buirs is a leadership coach and management trainer based in Amsterdam, specialising in management team development. This article explains why organisational problems often start at the top, not in middle management. It covers the power paradox (Keltner), psychological safety (Edmondson, Project Aristotle) and strategic misalignment as core challenges in management team development.
The fish starts rotting at the head.
It sounds harsh. But it is not an attack on leaders. It is an observation about systems.
When an organisation struggles with low engagement or a culture of politics and self-protection, the cause is rarely middle management. The cause sits one level higher.
And yet most development investments go to the managers. Not to the management team itself.
A collection of leaders is not a leadership team
Patrick Lencioni puts it plainly. Most management teams are not teams at all. They are groups of individuals who happen to attend the same meeting.
Everyone defends their own domain. Heads nod, decisions get "made", and an hour later everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
That is not collaboration. That is coexistence.
And the irony? Those same people expect their managers to create psychological safety and move forward as one team.
You cannot give what you do not have.
The power paradox
Management team members reached their position because of what set them apart. They listened well. They built trust. They knew how to bring people along.
Dacher Keltner, psychologist at UC Berkeley, describes what often happens next. The experience of power changes behaviour in ways most people do not see coming. Leaders become less empathetic, less inclined to listen, more focused on their own priorities. Not through bad intentions, but through what power does to the brain.
The paradox: the qualities that brought you to the top are precisely the qualities that power slowly erodes.
What else goes wrong
Three things I see time and again.
No shared vision. Research by MIT Sloan across 124 organisations found that only 28% of executives responsible for executing strategy could name three of their organisation's strategic priorities. More than half of senior executives disagree with each other on what those priorities even are. Not bad people. But no shared compass either.
Reward structures that punish collaboration. When someone's performance is measured on their own department's results, there is no rational reason to proactively help colleagues. The system rewards islands.
No time for development. The agenda is always full. Development gets postponed until there is a crisis. But development that only happens in a crisis is not development. That is firefighting at a higher level.
Psychological safety starts at the top
Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, spent decades researching team performance. Her conclusion is consistent: psychological safety is the single most important factor in whether a team functions well. Not talent, not budget, not structure.
Google confirmed this through Project Aristotle, a large-scale internal study into what separates high-performing teams from the rest. Psychological safety came out on top. Above everything else.
But if the management team does not model this itself, it spreads downward. Middle managers sense what is happening above them. They mirror it, even when they are not aware of it.
Two levels of development
Management team development works on two levels. Both are necessary.
The first is individual. Every management team member brings their own blind spots and patterns that show up in collaboration. That requires individual attention. Leadership coaching does this work. It addresses the person doing the leading, not just the role they occupy.
The second is collective. Shared language, shared norms, shared behaviour. You do not learn that alone. You learn it together, in a well-designed programme aimed at the team as a whole. For organisations that want to work on this structurally, management training at the MT level is a logical next step.
In closing
The healthiest organisations I know have one thing in common. The management team functions as a real team. They hold each other accountable, say what they think, and consciously choose shared success over individual scorecards.
That does not happen by itself. But it can be developed.
If you want to explore what that could mean for your management team, let's have a free introductory conversation. No obligation.
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