Working the In-Between: Practical Team Alchemy

Not enough people are talking about the middle.

Leadership content is full of advice about how to build a great team and plenty of diagnostic frameworks for identifying what's wrong with one. But the space between those two things - the uncomfortable, unglamorous territory where most teams actually live - gets skipped over more often than not. Because it doesn't make for a clean story, and because most leaders, if they're honest, would rather move through it quickly than work it deliberately.

The middle is messy. Progress is hard to measure and easy to question, especially when you’re in the work. It's the place where the team isn't broken enough to justify a major intervention but isn't performing at the level you know it's capable of. Where something is clearly off but nobody can quite name it. Where effort is being spent and results are still lagging and the diagnosis keeps shifting depending on who you ask.

This is the in between. And despite how uncomfortable it is, it's where team transformation actually happens. Not in the bold decisions or the structural overhauls, but in the slow, steady, unglamorous work of staying present to what's real and making consistent contact with what needs to shift.

Most leaders skip it. The ones who don't are the ones whose teams actually change.

Why the Middle Gets Skipped

Senior leaders are wired for resolution. The decisiveness, the pattern recognition, the ability to move quickly from problem to solution - all the skills that got you to where you are - are the same skills that make the middle feel intolerable. You can see what the team needs to become. You can see the gap between here and there. And everything in you wants to close it faster than the team is actually capable of moving.

So you push. Or you restructure. Or maybe introduce a new framework, a new initiative, or a new set of expectations. When the team doesn't immediately reorganize itself around the new direction, you diagnose the problem as resistance or capability or culture, and you start the cycle again.

What gets missed in that cycle is the work that actually creates transformation. The conversations that don't resolve cleanly, and the dynamics that need to be named before they can shift. The trust that has to be built in small increments before the team can operate at the level you're asking of it.

You can't optimize your way past the middle. You have to work it.

What’s Happening Beneath the Surface

Here's something most senior leaders don't want to sit with for too long: the gap between where your team is and where it needs to be is almost never a talent problem. It's a dynamic problem.

Teams get stuck in patterns. Somebody plays the victim, somebody plays the villain, somebody swoops in to rescue and everyone does their part so automatically that nobody realizes they're running a script. The roles rotate, the tension stays, and the team keeps performing a version of collaboration without ever actually doing it. David Emerald called this the Drama Triangle, and once you've seen it operating in a team, you can't unsee it.

The leader's job in the middle isn't to manage the drama, it's to flip it. To shift the team from a dynamic built around the problem to one built around ownership, possibility, and forward movement. That flip doesn't happen through a better process or a stronger directive. It happens when someone, usually the leader, is willing to name what's actually happening and create a different kind of invitation.

That's the work. And it starts with being honest enough to see the dynamic clearly before you try to change it.

Signal Clarity - Seeing What’s Really There

Before anything else can shift, a leader has to be able to read what's actually happening. Not the official version, not the story that protects everyone's performance review, but the real state of the team. What's working, what isn't, which relationships are load-bearing and which are quietly eroding, and what dynamics are present that nobody is naming out loud.

This is harder than it sounds because most teams have learned, often from their leader, what's safe to say and what isn't. When trust is low, communication is managed. People share the version of reality they believe you want to hear, and they do it so smoothly that it can take a while to realize that the signal you're getting has been filtered before it reached you.

Getting accurate signal requires a leader who responds to hard truths in ways that make it safe to keep offering them. Not performing openness — actually demonstrating it, consistently enough that the team starts to believe it's real.

Once the signal is clear, the next move becomes obvious even when it's uncomfortable: name what you're seeing. Teams in the middle usually know exactly what's wrong. They've known for a while. What they're waiting for is a leader willing to say it first — to name the dynamic, acknowledge the gap, and create the kind of honest shared reality that makes movement possible. That naming, done well, is often more transformative than any structured intervention that follows it.

Relational Gravity and Ownership

Most team performance problems are relationship problems wearing the costume of strategy or execution. When trust is low, collaboration is performative. When accountability is inconsistent, standards erode quietly until everyone has agreed to a lower bar without ever saying so out loud. When people don't feel genuinely connected to each other or to what they're building, engagement becomes transactional, and transactional teams don't transform.

Relational gravity is what holds a team together when things get hard. It's built through small, consistent acts of honesty, follow-through, and genuine attention over time. It can't be mandated, can't be built in a single offsite, and can't survive a leader who says the right things and then behaves in ways that contradict them.

Alongside it, ownership has to be real. Not assigned, not delegated with conditions, but genuinely held. When team members are in the Drama Triangle waiting to be rescued, blaming the circumstances, managing up instead of solving the actual problem the leader's most important move isn't to step in-  it's to hold the space for ownership to emerge, even when stepping in would be faster.

That patience is one of the hardest things to practice in the middle, and one of the most important.

Staying in the Crucible

The in between has a name inside Team Alchemy work: the Crucible. It's the place where the real transformation happens. Not before it gets hard, and not after it gets easy, but in the heat of the difficulty itself. In the unresolved conversation, the dynamic that's been named but not yet shifted, the trust that's being rebuilt after something broke it.

The instinct, almost universally, is to get out. To call in a new initiative, pivot to a new framework, restructure the team, or declare the current approach isn't working and start over. Sometimes those moves are right. More often, they're a way of avoiding the sustained, unglamorous work of staying present to what's actually happening and continuing to make contact with what needs to shift.

Staying in the Crucible doesn't mean being rigid. It means maintaining consistent contact with what's real, continuing to make the moves that matter, and trusting that the kind of transformation that actually lasts takes longer than any single quarter's timeline.

The leaders who can hold steady in the middle without rushing to resolution are the ones whose teams genuinely change. Not just perform better for a quarter, but operate differently in ways that hold.

INQUIRIES: To Understand the State of Your In Between

These aren't questions to answer in a meeting. Sit with them in genuine curiosity and honestly before doing anything else.

What is the real state of my team right now — not the version I'd report upward, but the version I'd tell a trusted colleague at the end of a hard week? 

or

Where am I moving too fast through the middle — pushing for resolution in a place that needs more presence before it needs more action? 

Let the gap between those two versions of reality tell you something.

ACTIONS: To Make Contact With What's Actually Happening

Choose one.

Have the Conversation You've Been Postponing
There's almost always one. Not because it's unimportant, but because it's uncomfortable and the timing never feels quite right. Name specifically with whom, and what you've been telling yourself about why it can wait. That postponed conversation is almost always load-bearing in the in between. Schedule it before the end of the week.

Name the Dynamic Out Loud
Identify one team dynamic that everyone seems aware of but nobody is naming directly. In your next relevant interaction, name it simply, without drama, without assigning blame. Say what you're observing and ask one open question about it. You don't need to solve it in that conversation. You just need to make it speakable.

PRACTICES: To Build the Habit of Working the Middle

Choose one and repeat it at the same time, on the same days, for two to four weeks.

Practice A — Tuesday and Thursday Reality Check
Twice a week, at the same time each day, sit down with a physical notecard and write one sentence: What is one thing happening in my team right now that I haven't made direct contact with yet? Put the card somewhere visible. Before the next check-in, take one concrete action toward making contact with it.

Practice B — The Weekly Naming Conversation
Once a week, on the same day, sit down with one team member for fifteen minutes — rotating through your team over time — with one agenda item: What's one thing about how we're working right now that we haven't talked about directly? No fixing required. The practice is the conversation itself, repeated weekly, until honest dialogue becomes the norm rather than the exception.

The Work Nobody Sees

The most important leadership work rarely makes it into the highlight reel. It happens in the conversations that didn't resolve cleanly, the dynamics named before they became crises, the trust built in increments small enough that nobody noticed until the team was suddenly operating at a level nobody expected.

That's what practical alchemy looks like. Not dramatic, not fast, not a single bold decision or a new framework rolled out in an all-hands meeting. It's the daily, deliberate, unglamorous work of staying present to what's real, making contact with what needs to shift, and trusting that the accumulation of those moves made consistently, over time, by a leader willing to work the middle instead of skipping it, that transforms a team.

The leaders who do this work don't always get credit for it in the moment. But their teams are the ones that last.

Alex Bednar is an Executive Coach specializing in Leadership Development. Connect with Alex at www.AndreaBednar.com for more insights on conscious leadership and operational excellence.