Leadership is not what you think it is. It’s not a checklist of competencies, a title, or the ability to command a room. Leadership happens between people—in the air between them—shaping what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

Yet most leaders don’t see it. They cling to the illusion that organisations run on strategies, plans, and structures stacked like building blocks. The real engine of any organisation isn’t rationality—it’s psychology. Emotions, hidden fears, group dynamics, and unconscious forces dictate what happens, often sabotaging official goals while leaders wonder why their perfect plans don’t stick.

When leaders ignore these forces, they find themselves saying or asking:

But leadership isn’t about issuing clearer instructions or hiring more competent people. It’s about shifting the system’s direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC).

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, but the Unconscious Eats Culture for Dinner

Peter Drucker was right: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But the truth runs deeper: the unconscious eats culture for dinner. You can design the perfect strategy, craft a compelling vision, and invest in a world-class team. But if the unconscious dynamics of your organisation are working against you, none of it will matter.

These hidden forces operate outside rational awareness, shaping what people actually do—regardless of what they say. Ignore them, and they will quietly, invisibly, and inevitably consume your best-laid plans.

This is not a theory. It is happening in your organisation right now.

The Unseen System in Leadership

There is what a leader says, and then there is what a group hears.

There is the rational strategy—the five-year plan, the KPIs, and the carefully worded vision statement.

And then there is the psychological reality—the fears, unconscious defences, and hidden group dynamics that determine whether any of it ever happens.

I did Seth Godin's altMBA some years ago, and one of our exercises illustrates this well. Draw the org chart of an organisation you know well. Now, map out how decisions, rank and power are distributed across the organisation. You will find that the org chart is a poor descriptor of how the organisation works.

Psychodynamic thinkers like Wilfred Bion identified that groups operate at two levels:

  1. The work level where tasks get done.
  2. The unconscious level where anxiety, defence mechanisms, and irrational forces shape behaviour.

This is why leadership is so hard. A company might say, “We want innovation,” but unconsciously, people fear losing status or competence, so they resist it. A team might say, “We need better collaboration,” but old rivalries and unspoken resentments get in the way.

These unconscious patterns always override the rational strategy. Anyone who has led knows the feeling of frustration when they are clear about what needs to happen and, at the same time, cannot get the team to make the change. You will often push against an invisible wall unless you work with these deeper forces.

The Three Hidden Forces That Run Your Organisation

Bion identified three core unconscious group dynamics that, if left unchecked, derail leadership:

  1. Fight-Flight
    When a group is overwhelmed by anxiety, it either attacks a perceived enemy (fight) or avoids the problem altogether (flight). This manifests as blame culture, endless restructures, scapegoating, or disengagement. Leaders trying to push through change often become the target of these unconscious attacks.
  2. Dependency
    Teams place all their hope in a leader to solve their problems, absolving themselves of responsibility. Leaders in dependency-driven organisations feel like they are constantly firefighting while their teams wait passively for direction.
  3. Pairing
    People avoid the hard work of leadership by forming alliances, hoping that two individuals (or subgroups) will produce a miraculous breakthrough. This leads to office politics, cliques, and wasted energy on coalition-building instead of execution.

These forces exist in every organisation. The question is whether you can recognise them and know how to work with them.

Making Leadership Happen

Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (DAC) from the Center for Creative Leadership describes Leadership as what happens between people. Rather than look for some idealised leader, we should look for evidence of:

When DAC is strong, leadership occurs. When DAC is weak, leadership is absent, no matter how brilliant a leader or how talented team members are. This is why brilliant organisations still fail. Success depends on organisations showing evidence (DAC) of leadership.

What This Means for Strategy

A strategy that ignores the psychodynamics of leadership will never take hold:

Outstanding leadership isn’t about control. It’s about creating a safe environment for the team to move forward. It’s about recognising resistance and dealing with the underlying fears. It’s about shaping the system, not issuing commands.

The leaders who do this well don’t just get results. They change the game.

They build organisations where you can taste the leadership in the air, and people look in from the outside, wondering how they do it.

Addendum: The Evidence Behind the Invisible Forces

While the concepts presented in “Beneath the Surface” may resonate with leaders' lived experiences, they are also supported by a robust body of empirical research. This addendum provides key evidence supporting the article’s central claims.

The Power of Unconscious Dynamics

Amy Edmondson’s groundbreaking research on psychological safety (1999) demonstrates how unconscious fears about status and competence significantly impact team performance. Her longitudinal studies revealed that teams where members feel safe to take interpersonal risks consistently outperform those where such safety is absent.

Google’s Project Aristotle (2012-2015) independently confirmed these findings after studying 180+ internal teams. Their researchers identified psychological safety as the primary differentiator between high and low-performing teams, surpassing all structural and procedural factors.

Bion’s Group Dynamics in Action

The Tavistock Institute has developed Bion’s theories through decades of applied research. Eric Miller and A.K. Rice (1967) expanded these concepts into organisational systems theory, demonstrating how unconscious dynamics manifest in workplace settings.

Robert French and Peter Simpson (2010) documented case studies validating Bion’s basic assumption patterns in contemporary organisations, showing how groups under stress default to fight-flight, dependency, and pairing behaviours just as Bion described.

Mark Stein’s (2004) research on crisis response further validates these patterns, showing how leadership groups facing uncertainty often exhibit precisely these dynamics, frequently to the detriment of effective decision-making.

Strategy Implementation: The Evidence

The gap between rational strategy and implementation reality is well-documented. Beer and Nohria (2000) found that approximately 70% of change initiatives fail to achieve their objectives, with psychological resistance identified as the primary factor—not technical shortcomings.

Kaplan and Norton (2005), creators of the Balanced Scorecard, later identified that 95% of employees don’t understand their organisation’s strategy, highlighting the psychological disconnect between leadership plans and workforce reality.

The DAC Model’s Impact

Wilfred Drath and colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership (2008) developed the Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (DAC) framework based on extensive field research showing that leadership effectiveness depends more on these collective outcomes than on individual leader traits or behaviours.

Subsequent studies by Van Velsor and McCauley have tracked implementation outcomes, demonstrating improved performance metrics when organisations focus on building DAC rather than traditional leadership competencies.

The Decisive Role of Unconscious Factors

Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony (2011) documented how cognitive biases systematically undermine strategic decision-making, explaining why even the most rational plans often fail in execution. Their research demonstrates that unconscious processes operate even—perhaps especially—when we believe we’re being purely rational.

Roberto’s research (2002) on decision-making during the 1996 Mount Everest disaster provides a stark illustration of how group dynamics, cognitive biases, and system complexity interact to override rational judgment, even among highly skilled individuals with clear objectives.

This evidence base confirms what many leaders intuitively understand: that beneath the surface of our rational plans and formal structures lie powerful psychological forces that truly govern organisational life. Addressing these forces isn’t just conceptually sound—it’s empirically validated as essential to effective leadership.