In our work with senior teams, one thing shows up consistently across sectors and contexts: patterns.
The topics change – strategy, structure, budget, delivery – but the underlying moves repeat. The same voices step into risk, the same people smooth conflict, the same arguments circle back in new language. Leaders who train themselves to notice these repetitions gain a different kind of data about what’s really happening in the system under pressure.
Noticing the pattern
Effective leadership starts with noticing. Patterns show up in tone, timing, and where attention collects or drains. A simple frame helps:
- Me: the inner responses that come alive under pressure – urgency, avoidance, rescuing, control.
- We: the relational choreography – who speaks for risk, who carries optimism, what gets rehearsed and what gets avoided.
- It: the organisational setting – structures, incentives, histories that make some moves easy and others expensive.
When leaders name patterns accurately, teams gain something to think with. It turns heat into information.
When the system looks for a holder
When under pressure, groups can generate more emotion than they’re able to process. That surplus seeks a home, and it often finds the leader.
Hopes, doubts, and frustrations are projected into them – as an unconscious way for the system to manage what feels unmanageable.
Seen this way, projection becomes data. If a leader is cast as “the blocker” or “the fixer”, we can become curious about what the team cannot yet articulate.
What is being asked of the role that belongs to the whole?
What are the thoughts, anxieties or fears that are easier to locate in the leader, rather for the team to own as individuals?
This mechanism can give us a really powerful insight into what’s going on for the group. It can also make the leadership role ‘heavy’ in challenging times, as they carry more than their share of difficult feelings.
The leader as a container
Containment is the capacity to hold pressure or tension long enough for thinking to reappear. Not absorbing everything; not smoothing everything; simply staying present with enough steadiness that the group can find language and choice again.
The leader receives the projections of the team, holds them, processes them…then re-shares them with the team in a way that’s easier for them to grapple with.
In practice, this can be a simple and light-touch action:
- Naming the temperature of the room in plain words.
- Turning feeling into something thinkable (“I’m hearing urgency and caution – what’s that about?”).
- Keeping a boundary that supports thinking (“Today we decide this; that is for next time”).
- Letting projections move through without sticking, and bringing attention back to the shared task.
Holding pattern and feeling together
Pattern detection without containment leaves interpretation without movement.
Containment without pattern detection focuses on comfort rather than progress.
The work is both: see the pattern; hold the heat; help the system choose.
Some questions:
- What’s repeating? What patterns are most alive here?
- What am I being asked to hold? As coach, as facilitator, as leader in the room.
- What wants attention? The decision, the relationship, the structure?
- What would create just enough safety for a different conversation? A clearer boundary, a smaller ask, a slower pace?
A small example
In one recent session, a team kept returning to the same question about a launch date. The arguments were familiar, but the outcome wasn’t moving. Rather than pushing for a call, we paused to describe what we were seeing. People noticed that risk was being managed privately, and that optimism had become a way of expressing loyalty.
From there, the conversation shifted a degree; there was a minor re-contracting. The team agreed to name assumptions and risks, and to bring concerns earlier, even if they were only half-formed. The leader agreed to share a little more of their thinking in the room, especially when the temperature rose. This generated a different quality of engagement, and made the team less guarded and more transparent.
Most teams don’t lack intelligence or effort. They get stuck in patterns they can’t see and feelings they can’t yet hold. Leaders who develop range in both – pattern literacy and containment – create the conditions for better judgement under pressure. That’s where traction begins.
