Stop Playing Team Mediator: How to Transform Dysfunctional Teams Without Exhausting Yourself
Many charity CEOs face the same exhausting pattern: spending their weeks playing referee with their leadership teams - mediating conflicts, reminding people of deadlines, and making sure everyone communicates properly. Despite all this effort, often the relationships don’t shift out of this dynamic.
But for some leaders, it's more than just mediation. There's a complex game of thinking several moves ahead with challenging team members - planning conversations carefully, considering how people will react, and trying to avoid predictable conflicts. It's mentally draining and takes energy away from the strategic work that should be their focus.
If this sounds familiar - if you find yourself constantly mediating between team members while strategically manoeuvring around difficult personalities - you're definitely not alone. This pattern is common in the third sector, where staff are driven by a passion to make a difference, and a desire to keep everyone happy; they exist in a system with limited resources resulting in unique pressures on leadership teams.
Let's explore why this happens and what you can do about it.
Why Being the Constant Mediator and Strategist Fails
This approach seems logical at first. You see problems clearly, you have the expertise to fix them, and you have ultimate responsibility for outcomes. Why not just step in, smooth things over, and carefully navigate around the difficult personalities?
But there are three critical issues, which make this strategy unsustainable:
It exhausts you: Constantly monitoring, anticipating, and intervening in team dynamics drains your mental and emotional resources. Thinking three steps ahead with challenging team members leaves little energy for strategic thinking, external relationships, or your own wellbeing.
It stunts your team: When you're always the one solving problems and carefully managing around difficult personalities, your team becomes dependent on your intervention rather than developing their own capabilities. They either wait for your direction or, worse, learn that inappropriate behaviour may not be addressed.
It addresses symptoms, not causes: Most team dysfunctions stem from systemic issues in communication or culture – not individual personalities. Mediating conflicts and strategizing around difficult people might create temporary peace but rarely leads to lasting change.
As one charity leader put it: "I realized I was treating symptoms while the disease kept spreading. I'd resolve one conflict only to find three more appearing elsewhere. I was spending all my time figuring out how to 'handle' certain people instead of leading."
Diagnosing the Real Issues
Before you can transform team dynamics, you need to understand what's actually happening beneath the surface. The invisible conflicts, communication breakdowns, or performance issues are often just symptoms of deeper problems.
There are three common root causes I see:
1. The Wrong Structure & Focus of Resources
When an organisation's structure doesn't support its purpose or strategic aims, it can undermine teamwork, and tensions can emerge. Look for these warning signs:
Unclear job roles, and ownership of work streams
Roles that overlap confusingly, creating a feeling of too many cooks
Decision-making processes that are unclear or inconsistently applied
For example, I've seen organisations where fundraising, communications and programme delivery all think they're responsible for social media content. And they’re right, they all do, but with different priorities and no clear decision-making process they all feel like someone is stepping on their toes. The resulting friction isn't about personalities; it's baked into the structure.
2. Communication Breakdowns
Even well-structured teams fail when information doesn't flow effectively. Common patterns include:
Important conversations happening in isolation (the "silo effect")
Different interpretations of priorities, deadlines, or quality standards
Individuals avoiding difficult conversations or differences of opinion leading to unresolved tensions
For instance, programme and fundraising teams might be working with completely different assumptions about organisational priorities – assumptions that are never explicitly discussed or resolved. One team prioritizes depth of impact while the other focuses on number of beneficiaries, creating constant tension that no amount of mediation will resolve.
3. Cultural Undercurrents
Culture – the unwritten rules about "how we do things here" – often drives behaviour more powerfully than formal policies. Problematic patterns include:
Getting caught up in crisis responses instead of focusing on prevention (the "heroic firefighter" syndrome)
Confusing busyness with effectiveness; resulting in presenteeism
The "too nice to be honest" syndrome where people smile and agree in meetings, then complain privately later
For example, many charity’s develop a culture where passive-aggressive communication becomes the norm. Everyone agrees pleasantly in meetings, but then quietly undermines decisions later. Direct feedback is seen as confrontational or "not how we do things here," so issues fester until they eventually erupt.
From Mediator to Culture Creator
So instead of exhausting yourself as the constant mediator and strategist, instead focus on creating the conditions where teams can function effectively without your constant intervention and manoeuvring.
Here's how to make this shift:
1. Create Clear Structures That Support Team Effectiveness
Rather than repeatedly solving the same problems, address the underlying structures that generate them:
Get crystal clear on roles and decision making: Make sure everyone knows who's responsible for what and who makes which decisions. The RACI approach (who's Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) can help sort this out.
Create simple ways for teams to keep in touch: Make sure teams who need to work together have regular ways to share information and updates. What matters is that people who depend on each other's work actually talk to each other regularly, without creating more meetings nobody has time for.
Make expectations and accountability straightforward: Create clear expectations and simple ways to track progress that everyone can see. And where expectations or KPIs are not met, this needs to be addressed promptly and with curiosity, not blame.
2. Transform How People Talk to Each Other
Instead of mediating conflicts, build new communication habits:
Make it safe to speak up: Establish team norms that make it okay to ask questions, admit mistakes, and raise concerns. Research consistently shows this psychological safety is the foundation of high-performing teams.
Get curious instead of judgmental: Replace "Why did you do that?" with "I'm curious about what led to this approach." The difference in response is remarkable.
Create structures for honest conversations: Use simple frameworks like "What happened? So what does it mean? Now what should we do?" to guide discussions through facts, meaning, and action.
3. Shape Your Culture Purposefully
Rather than fighting against existing cultural patterns, deliberately create new ones:
Highlight what's working: What gets noticed gets repeated. Be specific about which behaviours you want to see more of.
Make mistakes valuable, not shameful: Frame slip-ups as chances to improve rather than failures to be hidden. The question "What can we learn from this?" changes everything.
Show your own vulnerability: Demonstrate that it's safe to acknowledge limitations by being open about your own. This doesn't undermine authority – it makes you more relatable and creates permission for honesty.
Getting Started
If you're ready to move away from being a mediator, here are three straightforward steps you can take:
Look for patterns: When your team faces a challenge, ask yourself if you've seen this problem before. At your next exec or senior leadership team meeting, simply ask: "What issues do we keep facing over and over again? What might be causing these?" Listen to what people say without jumping in with answers.
Clarify one unclear area: Pick one part of your work where people seem confused about who's responsible for what. Have a straightforward conversation to sort it out and make sure everyone understands and agrees.
Try a different response: Next time someone brings you a problem, resist your usual approach of fixing it or carefully navigating around their personality. Instead, simply ask, "What do you think we should do?" Notice what happens when you put the ball in their court.
Remember that things won't change overnight. The goal isn't a perfect team, but an imperfect one. One where they can communicate honestly, make mistakes and find solutions without relying on you to save them.
If this resonates, and you’d like to explore how you can shift your team’s culture, let’s chat.