Have you ever considered that your skills as a family systems therapist can be a great fit for working with organizational teams and in business consulting?
You already know how to read structure, map power, spot unspoken rules, and notice who is in which role. You also understand that the person who is labeled the ‘problem team member ’ isn’t always the issue.
In this newsletter, I’ll show you just how transferable these skills are, so you can add another service to your website this week!
In case you missed it:
- My free intake assessment workbook for family therapy.
- My video on Hierarchy in Family Systems
The Core Insight Is Already Ours
The main think we know from family work is that you cannot fix a team by fixing individuals.
This is the core family systems argument, and it applies to organizations just like it does to families. When a workplace team is struggling, when trust is low, conflict is rising, or productivity is down, most managers and business coaches focus on finding the difficult person and addressing their behavior. Then, they turn to individual coaching, performance reviews, or warning letters.
It makes sense but, almost never resolves the system underneath.
The reason is familiar to us: the individual is often expressing a structural problem, and no amount of one-to-one work will shift a pattern that lives in the relationships between people, the hierarchy, the unspoken rules, and the way power moves through the system. We already know this from families and working with parents, and it applies here in full.
Family systems theory gives us a way to assess organizations structurally.
- Who holds power, and is that power recognized or challenged?
- How do decisions really get made compared to how they are supposed to?
- Are roles clearly defined, or is everyone quietly doing the same informal job because nothing is clear?
- What are the unspoken rules that everyone follows?
Those are the questions business coaches rarely ask, but they're also the same sort of questions we're trained to ask every time we sit down with a new family.
The 8 Structural Ways To See Problems In Teams.
When I assess a team, I look at eight areas taken directly from structural family systems theory, and all of thes are going to be familiar to you, because you already use them when you map a family.
Power
In families, power is rarely where you expect it. The parent who seems to run things may actually defer to the child during conflict. The parent who seems passive may have the final say
Teams work in similar ways, although there's obviously a person with 'official' power, like team leaders or CEOs.
The org chart tells you the official story of the company, but what you see in the team will tell you what's real.
The same family skills we use in therapy, apply when we work with a team - we'd notice who gets interrupted and who stops talking when someone else enters the room. We'd ask about who leads a meeting even if they are not the official chair. I might try to notice who goes quiet when a certain colleague disagrees. These are the team’s power patterns, and they're not the obvious ones related to pay grades and titles..
The clinical approach here is the same as in family work: do not treat the hierarchy as fixed. Instead, map where power actually flows, who defers, who dominates, and whether people are aware of these patterns or not.
Roles
Roles in a company are likely going to be found on business cards or email signatures, but we're more interested in roles in a team.
Every team has someone who manages the emotional temperature of the room. Someone who raises the difficult thing no one else will say. Someone who keeps the peace at the cost of clarity, and someone who gets blamed when things go wrong, regardless of whether they caused it.
They are structural roles, and just like in families, who have an 'identified patient' and they are usually assigned rather than chosen. People take on these roles gradually, often without realizing it, and the roles stick.
In a company role, you might find you're the person who finds themselves picking up the coffee before the team meeting. It all works as long as you don't mind getting the coffee each week, but if you feel burdened by it, stuck and unable to change it, it may start impacting your performance or attitude and that's when problems start.
This matters in teamwork because the person who faces the most friction often reveals what the system is trying to avoid, perhaps talking about workload or division of labor. The team member labeled "difficult" often handles emotional and structural work that others avoid. The office scapegoat is doing the same job as the family scapegoat: carrying something that belongs to the whole system.
Before you do anything else, map the roles. Who is playing what function, and who put them there?
Hierarchy
In a healthy team, the hierarchy is clear enough to make decisions and flexible enough to respect expertise at any level. Most struggling teams lack both clarity and flexibility.
Instead, you often find a hierarchy that is invisible, contested, or rigid in the wrong ways. Invisible hierarchies cause confusion about who has authority. I can't tell you how common this is when I work with adults who have jobs in start-up or tech companies.
Rigid hierarchies create passivity, where people stop thinking for themselves because every decision needs approval from the top, and unclear hierarchies cause burnout and performance concerns.
A team with an unclear or contested hierarchy will show the same symptoms as a family with a confused leadership group: acting out, triangulation, and ongoing conflict with no clear solution. The answer is usually creating a more clear structure and expectations.
Rules
Every organization has two sets of rules. The ones written in the handbook, and the ones that actually govern how people behave. The second set is far more powerful, and almost no one has ever named them out loud - like how it's your job to get coffee before the meeting may have come from a rule that someone in that meeting expects coffee.
In teams, these unspoken rules might be anything -
- We do not tell the director when projects are behind,
- We agree in meetings but raise disagreements in private, or
- We do not question decisions once they are made, even if we have new information.
No one decided on these rules, they developed over time, shaped by what was rewarded and what was punished, usually without anyone realizing it. I wrote a post on family rules you should check out here.
In family work, these are the family rules Minuchin described as the governing logic of the system. They're just as present in organizations, and they're just as hard to shift without first naming them.
When a team is stuck, ask what the unspoken operating rules are before looking for individual explanations.
Structure
Structure, in Minuchin's sense, is the pattern around power, and who communicates with whom, in what way, about what, and with what regularity. In a family, structure becomes visible in how people physically arrange themselves, who speaks first, who is addressed when information needs to reach someone, and who is left out of which conversations.
In teams, the equivalent is both spatial and relational. Who is copied on what emails, and who is conspicuously not? Who presents to leadership, and who is never in the room? Which departments talk to each other directly, and which route all communication through a single intermediary?
These patterns show the real organizational structure, rather than what is on the company's org chart. Knowing how information moves, how decisions are made, and where the system might break down under stress is just what we do in family therapy, and being able to read these patterns is a clinical skill we've already got.
Boundaries
Every healthy team has boundaries between roles, departments, and levels of hierarchy. These boundaries should be clear enough to create security, but open enough to allow real collaboration. When boundaries are too rigid or too loose, problems start to appear.
Rigid boundaries create silos, in the form of departments that barely communicate, or teams repeat work without realizing it, and individuals who guard their responsibilities so closely that nothing crosses over without a formal process. Information does not flow well, and the team feels disconnected even if everyone is working toward the same goal.
Diffuse boundaries lead to team enmeshment. There is no clear ownership of decisions, everyone is involved in everything, and meetings take up all available time because no one knows what their responsibilities are. Team members stop trusting their own judgment because the system has not made their authority clear.
The boundary question in teamwork is exactly the question we ask about families: who belongs to which subsystem, who has access to what, and who is maintaining those walls in indirect ways because they've never been made explicit?
Personality, Learning, and Communication Differences
Most corporate training programs focus on this area, using tools like the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, the DISC profile, or strengths workshops. It's not unhelpful - although I can never remember what those INSFPFX things stand for. It is more helpful to understand that people process information, communicate, and handle risk in different ways, which is again a skill we use in session.
What corporate leadership programs often miss is the systemic side. Individual differences alone do not cause problems in teams. Problems arise when a system has no way to talk about these differences, no agreed way to bridge them, and no structure to resolve the friction they create. That is where dysfunction starts.
In our work, we already know how to hold both levels at once: the individual's characteristic patterns and the relational context that either supports or amplifies those patterns. A highly risk-averse team member in a leadership culture that rewards decisive action will create a particular structural dynamic.
A strong communicator in a team that routes everything through a written process will create a different one. The difference isn't in the person. It's in the fit between the person and the system they're inside.
Diversity
Any underrepresented trait in a team, such as age, ethnicity, gender, neurodivergence, or other differences, can lead to stereotyping and categorization if it is not addressed.
This is not just about individual bias, though bias does exist. It is a structural issue: groups that are mostly the same develop unspoken norms, and anyone who does not fit those norms feels pressure that most of the team does not notice.
The clinical relevance of this for our work is that diversity-driven tension rarely presents as diversity-driven tension. It presents as "a communication issue," or "a personality clash," or "they're just not a good culture fit." The presenting complaint obscures the structural driver.
What we're trained to do- to look beneath the surface content for the underlying relational pattern is exactly the skill required here. When friction keeps returning to the same people across different situations, we would ask what structural function that friction is serving, and whose difference is being managed through it.
If you have ever thought about doing organizational work but felt it was not for you, I hope this post has helped you see that you are not starting from zero. The theory, assessment skills, and clinical instincts you already have are exactly what most corporate team-building work is missing.
The context might be or feel different, but the map you need to create to find the issues, is exactly the same.
Until the next one,
Oliver & My People Patterns
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