You’ve introduced the new strategy. You’ve been clear about the goals, the rewards, and the “why.” By all accounts, the team should be moving forward.
Instead, you feel a strange, lingering resistance. It’s not that people are being difficult, in fact, they might even agree with you, but there is a collective “stuckness” in the air. It feels like you are fighting an invisible set of rules that no one has written down.
In psychodynamic consultancy, we often find that when a team can’t move forward, it’s because they are still living with a “ghost.”
Every organisation has a history. Long after a founder has left, a merger has finished, or a round of redundancies has ended, the emotional memory of those events remains in the walls.
These memories create an “Invisible Rulebook.”
Don’t speak up; the last person who did was sidelined. Don’t take risks; the company doesn’t actually have your back. Wait for permission; independence is punished here.
As a leader, you are managing the people in the room, but you are also managing the “ghosts” of the experiences and people who came before you. If your predecessor was a micromanager, your team might still be “waiting for orders” even if you’ve given them total autonomy. They aren’t reacting to you; they are reacting to the ghost.
The problem with these ghosts is that they thrive in silence. Because we don’t talk about how things used to be or the time we all felt let down, the trauma or the habit, stays alive in the system.
We see this manifest as passive-aggressive compliance: people saying “yes” in meetings but doing nothing afterward. Or risk aversion: a sudden loss of creativity or initiative. Or unexplained turnover: good people leaving because they can feel the “heaviness” but can’t name it.
To lead a team out of this, you have to move beyond being a manager and become something of an archeologist. You have to be willing to dig into the “invisible workplace” and ask:
“What happened here before I arrived that makes this new change feel unsafe?”
When you acknowledge the ghost, when you say, “I know the last time we tried this, it didn’t go well,” you take away its power. You signal to the team that you see the invisible rules they’ve been following, and that you are offering them a new set of rules to live by.
Leading isn’t just about looking at the horizon; it’s about understanding the ground you are standing on. You cannot build a new culture until you understand the old one that is still haunting your boardroom.
Once you name the ghost, the team can finally stop looking backward and start moving forward with you.
