The Turbulence of a New Arrival

“Patterns of childhood play out in the boardroom, mostly outside of conscious awareness.”

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The arrival of a new member almost always causes turbulence in a group, whether that group is a family, a friendship circle, or a senior leadership team. Sometimes the disruption is subtle. Sometimes it’s dramatic. But it’s always there.

This isn’t just about “settling in” or learning the rules. It comes from something deeper. Human beings don’t walk into groups as blank slates. We carry with us a lifetime of patterns, instincts, and needs – many of them formed long before we ever set foot in a workplace. When those collide with the patterns of others, friction is inevitable.

The biggest myth in teamwork

In the world of Talent and Organisational Development, one of the most persistent slogans is: “There is no I in team.”

It’s meant as a reminder that teams succeed when individuals subordinate ego to the collective. But in real-world leadership teams, the picture is far messier.

These teams are usually made up of what I sometimes call “big beasts”: people who are complex, sophisticated, and carry plenty of ego, opinion, and personality. They didn’t get to the top by fading into the background. They got there by being noticed, by making their mark, by speaking up and standing firm. Organisations tend to reward those qualities, and rightly so. They bring energy, drive, and conviction.

But when many such people gather in the same room, those very strengths can collide.

What helped them rise as individuals can now pull in different directions at the collective level.

In such groups, the real challenge is not drafting rules of engagement, or holding the occasional team-building day. Those things can help, but when the pressure rises, rules alone can’t stop unconscious compulsions from surfacing – the ingrained habits of relating, competing, or defending that so often derail collaboration.

How childhood shapes the boardroom

We often assume senior leadership teams are populated entirely by rational adults, making decisions through logic, strategy, and professionalism.

But anyone who has watched a team under pressure knows otherwise. The truth is, many of the dynamics in leadership teams owe more to our formative experiences in childhood than to deliberate rationality.

Take sibling dynamics.

“The eldest child is an only child until they’re not,” is a line I often use with clients. At first, the eldest has no competition for love and attention. Then a sibling arrives, and everything changes.

Some firstborns respond by demanding even more attention. Some withdraw into “I’m not important.” Others position themselves as helper or “extra parent.”

The younger child has to adapt too. One way of being has already been taken. So they carve out something different. Some rebel. Some become the compliant “good” child. Some stay quiet for fear of ridicule. Some try to outshine the older sibling.

Parents, for their part, try – consciously or otherwise – to adapt their love and attention. But it’s impossible to get this balance exactly right. As Philip Larkin wrote, with characteristic bite:

They f*** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

Those negotiations for attention, belonging, and influence don’t vanish when we grow up. They resurface – often with surprising intensity – in the dynamics of adult teams.

When a new team member arrives

The need for respect and belonging. The need to win. The need for power and influence. The need to be “loved.” The fear of failure or exclusion. These drivers are just as present in leadership teams as they are in playgrounds. And they are often amplified when a new member arrives.

No matter how senior, teams regularly fall into dysfunctional adaptations in these moments. Or as I often put it: we behave in ways that get us more of what we don’t want.

Here are a few examples.

Case 1: The old boss who wouldn’t let go

A client of mine became CEO of a consultancy. Her new boss had been promoted internally from that same role into a global job – more senior, but also more political, more complex, and at first, more uncomfortable.

On the surface, he seemed assured. Underneath, his discomfort dented his self-confidence. Seeking reassurance, he “dropped in” too often to his old team. It was framed as connection. In truth, it was a search for validation – and he became a willing recipient of nostalgic tales about the “better old days.”

The team, eager to stay close to their still-influential ex-boss, played along. Subtle comparisons undermined the authority of the new CEO. Worse, her predecessor even criticised her for not asserting herself enough.

Feeling undercut, my client responded with a more forceful style than was natural for her. That in turn reinforced the “good old days” narrative and hardened resistance to her leadership.

It took a series of tripartite meetings – involving her, her predecessor, and me – to surface these dynamics and begin to shift them. Until then, unconscious needs and reflexes had been steering behaviour unchecked.

Case 2: The team that didn’t need to be a team

Another client: a highly capable executive group at a global insurance company. They had invested heavily in away days designed to forge them into a “high-performing team.” Everyone enjoyed the sessions, but nothing really changed back at work.

When we asked a different question – what is the team you actually need to be? – the penny dropped.

In reality, their business units had little interdependence. Their most important connections were bilateral, not collective, and ran mainly through shared services like HR, IT, and Finance.

So we shifted focus to those bilateral relationships. That change released long-standing friction. Letting go of the fantasy of a conventional “top team” brought relief – and freed them to work in ways that were more effective and profitable.

Case 3: the overeager new arrival

A newly appointed Head of Territory in a global financial services firm tried to ward off imposter feelings with an over-eager zeal to impress. He frequently dropped in references to how things had been done in his previous company, hoping to display competence and value.

To him, this was proof of experience. To his peers, it was arrogance. They began excluding him, labelling him narcissistic, untrustworthy, and “not a team player.”

That exclusion only deepened his insecurity, which made him double down – talking more about his past achievements, pushing harder, reinforcing the very behaviour that alienated him. And so the spiral continued.

His boss grew frustrated with the team “not playing nicely.” Through a mix of one-to-one coaching, tripartite sessions with team members, and a facilitated team day, we created the space for people to talk about what was really driving them. Once those patterns were surfaced, empathy grew, bridges formed, and the team began to recover.

Beneath the behaviour

All of these examples – the nostalgic ex-CEO, the executive group chasing the wrong model of teamwork, the overeager newcomer – were driven by compulsions formed long before these leaders set foot in their organisations. Patterns of childhood playing out in the boardroom, mostly outside of conscious awareness.

In many teams, the sub-plot is the same: jostling for attention, influence, allyship, inclusion, rivalry. Sometimes that energy is healthy. Sometimes it corrodes.

The trick is not to suppress these impulses, but to understand them – individually and collectively – and to create conditions where they can be channelled constructively.

Creating the space for real understanding

Day-to-day work leaves little room for this kind of exploration. “Jobs to be done” dominate. Team-building days often skim the surface. Drinks at the pub offer camaraderie but rarely change patterns.

What’s needed are spaces where people can step back, surface what’s really happening, and see both themselves and others in a fuller light.

In our work, that often means going beyond one-to-one coaching to include group sessions, small-group conversations, and tripartite meetings – three-way dialogues between a coach, a coachee, and a key colleague such as a line manager. These layers connect individual insight with team dynamics, so that change happens across the system, not in silos.

Why this work matters

These conversations are not always comfortable. But they are often the catalyst for shifts that no amount of process tinkering can deliver. We’ve seen long-standing conflicts dissolve, collaboration rise, and results improve – not because people suddenly “liked” each other, but because they understood each other more deeply.

In other words,self-awareness and emotional intelligence are not “nice-to-haves” but genuine, commercial assets, underpinning the trust, adaptability, and cohesion on which performance depends. When organisations invest in this kind of work, they’re building the conditions for sustained effectiveness, even through turbulence.

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