‍Sometimes strong relationships at work are built on shared adversity, not a healthy culture.

We’ve all seen it happen.

A team that seems incredibly close. They have inside jokes. They finish each other’s sentences. They help one another without hesitation. From the outside, it looks like the perfect team.

Then you spend a little time with them.

Almost every conversation eventually circles back to the same person.

“Did you hear what happened this morning?”

“I had to fix their work…again.”

“Make sure you copy me on that email because they’ll deny saying it.”

The team isn’t just collaborating.

They’re surviving.

As human beings, we’re wired to seek safety in groups. When one individual consistently creates stress, uncertainty, or conflict, the rest of the team naturally forms alliances. They exchange information, develop workarounds, protect one another, and create informal support networks.

It’s a survival mechanism.

While this can create strong interpersonal relationships, it can also hide a much larger organizational problem.

Shared Adversity Creates Strong Bonds

Think about soldiers who serve together.

Firefighters entering burning buildings.

Emergency room staff working through a mass casualty event.

Their relationships become incredibly strong because they’ve faced adversity together.

The workplace operates on the same psychological principles, just with different consequences.

A difficult coworker may not threaten someone’s physical safety, but they can threaten psychological safety.

Employees begin asking questions like:

• “Will they throw me under the bus?”
• “Will they miss another deadline?”
• “Will I have to clean this up again?”
• “Should I document this conversation?”

When uncertainty becomes predictable, people naturally rely on each other.

The team becomes stronger.

Not because leadership created a great culture.

Because the employees created one for themselves.

The Hidden Cost

Here’s where leaders often get fooled.

They see a team that communicates well.

People laugh together.

They help one another.

They cover vacations.

Everything appears healthy.

What they don’t see is the amount of energy being consumed managing one person.

Instead of discussing innovation…

They’re discussing avoidance.

Instead of improving customer experience…

They’re creating workarounds.

Instead of solving business problems…

They’re solving people problems.

Every minute spent navigating unnecessary conflict is a minute not spent creating value.

That’s expensive.

Not just emotionally.

Operationally.

An IT Delivery Example

Imagine a Remote Support team responsible for supporting 8,000 employees across multiple countries.

Nine analysts consistently collaborate.

Tickets are handed off smoothly.

Knowledge articles are updated.

Major incidents are resolved quickly.

But one analyst refuses to document their work, ignores established procedures, and regularly closes tickets without fully resolving the issue.

At first, the rest of the team simply picks up the slack.

Then patterns begin to emerge.

Before handing work to that analyst, everyone takes screenshots “just in case.”

Team members start copying managers on routine emails because they anticipate future disputes.

Knowledge that should be stored in the ITSM platform gets shared privately through Microsoft Teams chats because it’s faster than involving the difficult coworker.

Certain analysts quietly volunteer for extra work simply to avoid assigning tickets to that individual.

The morning stand-up slowly changes.

Instead of discussing service improvements, automation opportunities, or recurring incident trends, conversations revolve around avoiding rework, verifying information, and deciding who will fix yesterday’s mistakes.

From a management perspective, the dashboard still looks healthy.

Service levels remain green.

Customer satisfaction hasn’t dropped—yet.

But beneath those metrics, something dangerous is happening.

The team has developed an informal operating model designed to work around one person instead of through the organization’s defined processes.

Eventually, burnout appears.

High performers become frustrated.

Knowledge becomes fragmented.

Trust in leadership declines because everyone sees the problem, but no one believes it’s being addressed.

The difficult employee didn’t damage the culture alone.

The organization’s unwillingness to resolve the issue allowed the culture to adapt around dysfunction.

Managers Need to Ask Better Questions

When a team appears unusually close, don’t automatically assume everything is healthy.

Ask yourself:

• What brings this team together?
• Are they united by a shared purpose?
• Or are they united by a shared frustration?
• Are they collaborating to achieve excellence…
• Or collaborating to survive dysfunction?

Those answers reveal very different cultures.

Can Teams Find a Way Around the Problem?

Absolutely.

In fact, most teams do.

That’s what makes this issue so dangerous.

Talented employees are incredibly adaptable.

They’ll build unofficial processes.

Create undocumented workarounds.

Double-check each other’s work.

Protect one another.

Compensate for weak performers.

From the outside, performance appears stable.

Inside, people are exhausted.

The workaround becomes the new normal.

And every workaround silently tells employees:

“Leadership either doesn’t see the problem… or has chosen to live with it.”

Eventually, your best people stop finding ways around the problem.

They find another place to work.

Lessons for Managers

Great managers don’t judge culture solely by smiles, laughter, or teamwork.

They look deeper.

Healthy teams collaborate because they’re pursuing a common mission.

Unhealthy teams often collaborate because they’re shielding each other from unnecessary stress.

One builds engagement.

The other builds endurance.

Your responsibility isn’t simply to celebrate a resilient team.

It’s to understand why they needed to become so resilient in the first place.

Because resilience should help people overcome unexpected challenges—not compensate for problems leadership has the authority to solve.

Conclusion

A close-knit team isn’t always evidence of a healthy workplace.

Sometimes it’s evidence that employees have become experts at surviving a problem that should have been addressed long ago.

As leaders, we should celebrate teamwork.

But we should also ask a difficult question:

Are my people working together to achieve success… or simply helping each other survive Monday?

Key Takeaways

✅ Teams naturally form alliances when facing a common workplace challenge.

✅ Shared adversity can strengthen relationships, but it can also hide organizational dysfunction.

✅ Informal workarounds often mask leadership problems rather than solving them.

✅ Strong teamwork should be driven by purpose, not by the need to compensate for one difficult coworker.

✅ Great leaders look beyond visible collaboration and ask why the team has become so dependent on one another.

‍