Everything Deserves Diagnosis
Why everything at work deserves diagnosis (not just stress)
If you’ve been around for a little while you've probably heard me bang on about stress deserving diagnosis rather than a generic "top 10 tips" approach. But it's not just stress that deserves this treatment.
Everything going on behind your and your team's behaviour deserves proper diagnosis.
That "difficult" employee who keeps resisting change? There's something backstage driving that behaviour.
The team that can't seem to implement the new system you've explained three times? Something's happening behind the scenes.
The person who's suddenly gone from high performer to bare minimum? Yeah, there's something going on there too.
What's really going on?
Most of us only see what's happening onstage; the behaviour, the resistance, the mistakes, the conflict. That's just the performance. The real story is happening backstage. If we only treat what we can see onstage, we're wasting everyone's time and money.
I've won work where clients have asked me to upskill their team. Get them trained up. Get them performing better. When I start working with that team, it becomes clear pretty quickly that they're not ready for training because they can't actually hear us right now. There's too much stuff going on backstage that we need to understand first.
A classic example is when teams become stuck feeling like the victims. You know the one "it's been done to us", "they're the baddies, we're the goodies", "management don't understand."
If you invest in training people who are sitting in that mindset, you're throwing money down the drain.They won't hear half of what's being said. They won't take it in. They'll be too busy grappling with the competing narrative already running in their heads.
What's the secondary gain?
And it’s not that they are being difficult. Remember, we need to diagnose (not judge). Most people are motivated (or not motivated) by secondary gain. What they perceive they're losing or gaining from a situation.
If someone is resisting change have you considered what it is that they might be protecting? What is it that they think they'll lose? When there is a team operating in silo what is the perceived benefit of staying separate to the wider team? Consider what the employee who "just wants to do their hours and go home" is gaining from that position.
Meet them where they are
Before you can move your team forward, you need to understand where they actually are right now. Not where you want them to be. Not where they should be. Where they are.
And to do that you need to get to know them. I mean really know them. Not just their CV and their job title. Get curious about what is happening backstage that you simply haven’t seen.
Take a look behind the scenes
When I work with teams like this, we need to take a proper look behind the scenes, the backstage area I like to talk about, the mental stuff, the dynamics at play.
Then and only then can we assess readiness for training and development.
Without looking behind, we're just making assumptions:
"I just need them to..."
"What's stopping them is..."
"They can't..." or "They won't..."
I always ask leaders: What assumptions are you making?
Assumptions aren't diagnosis. Treating assumptions as facts is how you end up with training programmes that don't land and change initiatives that fizzle out.That’s all a very costly and ineffective exercise.
Are we forgetting something?
People won't show you what's really going on backstage unless they trust you. And trust doesn't come from a tick-box exercise or a quick team-building day.
When I work with teams, I create the space for people to actually talk about what's happening behind the scenes. I ask the questions that help them surface what they've been holding back. And I help leaders understand that getting to this level of honesty isn't about being their mate, it's about demonstrating you're genuinely curious about their experience, not just judging their output.
Sometimes that means uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes it means sitting with the messy truth of what's actually going on. But you can't fix what you can't see, and you can't see it if people don't trust you enough to show you.
Get curious, not furious
So how do you build that trust and actually get to the truth? By asking better questions and genuinely caring about the answers.
Building trust and getting a proper diagnosis means asking questions like:
What's really behind this behaviour?
What might they perceive they're gaining or losing here?
What's happening backstage that I can't see?
Where are they at right now - not where I need or want them to be?
What assumptions am I making?
Only when you've done that work, when you've understood what's really going on behind the scenes, can you work out what actually needs to change.
Sometimes it's the team that needs to rebuild first, before any training can stick. Sometimes it's trust that needs building. Sometimes it's addressing the secondary gain that's keeping people stuck.
So what now then?
Stop treating symptoms. Stop rolling out training programmes and wondering why nothing changes. Start with diagnosis. Get curious about what's really going on backstage.
Everything deserves diagnosis. Not just stress.
Are you ready to work out what's really going on with your team? Book a call and let's take a proper look behind the scenes.