Today we touch on a topic that I come across very often when I hold training courses for corporate teams.
It goes without saying that relational problems do not exist only between individuals, but often also between different departments, whose respective captains appear to be in competition with each other, giving rise to internal feuds that are even more harmful to the company.

It is a thorny issue and, to resolve it, the company often organizes training or Team Building sessions to involve the team members, events in which it is very rare for leaders or company heads to participate, always too busy, or hidden behind the alibi of having already taken courses of all kinds and not needing them.

I know that I will be hated by department heads, managers and various bosses, but I am convinced that, when the top management does not participate in these moments, they are communicating to the team, indirectly, that the relational problems do not concern them and that, if the relationships are not fluid, the fault lies with the individual team members.

You may have often heard the adage “the fish stinks from the head” and, in my experience, when a company is struggling with interpersonal trust between employees, I can say that these words are often very true.

It is precisely the word TRUST that is the pivot on which relationships revolve and can become fluid and pleasant, or seriously dysfunctional.
We owe the “theory of relationship levels” in the workplace to the immense work of Edgar Shein, an organizational psychologist who left us in 2023, which I find extremely lucid and interesting.

I will try to summarize it for you today and, probably, it will open your eyes to the reality you are experiencing at work.
Enjoy!