Hello Reader,
Gillian Faith said something on this week's episode that I think we can all relate to.
We were talking about healthcare teams: why they get stuck, why communication breaks down, why a well-meaning group of skilled clinicians can still feel like they're spinning their wheels. And she said: "Sometimes you can't see the wood from the trees."
That's it. That's the whole thing, really.
When you're inside the system — really inside it, running codes, managing census, covering nights, holding the team together through a staffing crisis — the view from where you stand is both hyperreal and strangely limited. You see everything that's immediately in front of you. You may not see the larger pattern your team is part of, the interdependencies that are shaping what feels like your problem, or the dynamics you've all quietly agreed to normalize.
Klaus, Gillian, and I have been doing deep work together in Systemic Team Coaching®, and this episode was our first conversation about what that lens actually looks like in practice for healthcare teams. Not theory. The real thing — what happens when teams are caught in blame, when the quiet voices stay quiet, when the person who talks too much fills every room.
The Blame Loop That Nobody Talks About
Here's what I see again and again: a team in a stressed healthcare environment, blaming another department, blaming leadership, blaming the system. And sometimes they're right — the system is broken in real and structural ways. We're not here to paper over that.
Gillian made a distinction about this:.
"Blame is never really healthy. Shifting to curiosity is a way to help move away from that mindset — because sometimes we don't know the whole story. We don't understand the whole picture."
Curiosity is not naïveté. It's not pretending the problem doesn't exist. It's asking the question that actually gets you more information: Can you help me understand how that situation played out?
What changes when you ask that instead of assigning fault? You get more of the picture. You start to see what's happening in the other team, the other department, the other person's week. And sometimes you discover that you're both bumping into the same larger system — not each other.
Klaus put it this way: "What could be the reason that I'm feeling this way, or the situation is happening? And how do we open the room to say, 'Hey, we are both struggling here. What can we do different together that we couldn't do apart?'"
The Voices That Don't Speak Up
One of the things Systemic Team Coaching® does that I find genuinely compelling is this: it makes space for the voices that have gotten used to being quiet.
Every team has them. The newer team member who hasn't earned enough seniority to feel safe. The person who's been there for years and has learned that speaking up doesn't change anything anyway. The one who tried once and got burned.
Gillian and Klaus named something that I think a lot of leaders don't fully reckon with: psychological safety has to be spoken out loud. Written down. Turned into a charter that the team actually uses. Not just assumed because everyone seems okay at morning huddle.
"Some of the greatest shifts you can have are from the voices that are sometimes quiet — because they just don't feel safe to speak up." — Klaus
This isn't a soft leadership nice-to-have. Amy Edmondson's research showed that the highest-performing healthcare teams weren't the ones that made fewer errors. They were the ones who talked about the errors they made and got stronger from the conversation.
What I'm Taking Away
- Curiosity is a practice, not a personality type. You don't have to naturally be curious in a tense moment. You take the three-second pause and choose the question anyway.
- Teams form around the patient — and that's exactly right. But team dynamics become secondary by necessity, not because they don't matter. This creates a structural blindspot that Systemic Team Coaching® is designed to address.
- The "quiet one" and the "loud one" are both clues. Neither is the problem. Both are telling you something about the team's current level of psychological safety.
- Leadership and wellbeing are not separate tracks. Gillian closed with this, and it's the throughline of everything we do: "We can't have strong, effective leadership without wellbeing. The two go hand-in-hand. You can't separate them."
What's Inspiring Us This Week
The framing Klaus and Gillian brought to this episode — "outside in and future-focused" — is the lens that Systemic Team Coaching® uses to orient a team. It starts with the question: What do all the stakeholder groups around us actually need from our team? And then it works backward from there.
That's a fundamentally different starting point than most team problem-solving, which tends to start inside the frustration and work outward. Worth trying, even informally, the next time your team is stuck.
🎧 Listen to the podcast sneak peek episode below and listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Podbean, or Amazon Music.
Stay mindful and keep leading,
Lillian
Founder & CEO
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