The Greatest Burden a Team Can Carry
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
It’s true for families. And it’s true for leaders and their teams.
Even the strongest teams can feel stuck, and most leaders don’t realize why. When leaders don’t do their own growth work, the unfinished parts of themselves leak into team dynamics. Over time, the team starts carrying not just the company’s goals, but the leader’s baggage.
Why the “Unlived Life” Matters at Work
My whole field is based on the idea that we cannot see ourselves in completion. There are part of ourselves we will never know unless we get feedback from others (like coaches, therapists, and the people around us). In graduate school, it was required to be in therapy for this reason. The unlived life is the part of ourselves we haven’t fully faced. The ambitions never pursued. The insecurities left unresolved. The patterns that quietly drive us.
We saw this with a founder who had built her company from a handful of employees to a hundred. She had always been praised for being “the problem-solver,” the one who could fix anything. It became her identity.
But as the company scaled, her role needed to shift. The executive team needed her to focus on vision and strategy. Instead, she stayed deep in the weeds, jumping in to solve operational issues that her leaders could handle.
One executive admitted: “I know she wants us to lead, but the moment she steps in, we all step back.”
The team wasn’t just doing their jobs. They were living out her unlived life - her unacknowledged need to still be the fixer.
And this is how it shows up more broadly:
A leader who never felt recognized demands constant validation
A leader who fears conflict avoids hard conversations, leaving tension unresolved
A leader who still defines success by hustle pushes their team to overwork, even when smarter would be better
The team ends up carrying what the leader hasn’t yet addressed. Not because the leader wants to burden them, but because unexamined patterns always find expression.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
What Happens if We Ignore This?
Teams adapt, but not in healthy ways.
They mirror the leader’s habits, even when it burns them out. They hold back ideas that don’t fit the leader’s story. They look engaged on the surface, but underneath they’re drained and disconnected.
Performance may hold for a while. But eventually the cracks show: turnover rises, engagement falls, and innovation slows.
The tragedy isn’t in conflict itself. It’s in the way unrealized potential becomes someone else’s weight to carry.
The Groops Take
We believe the best leaders don’t just manage others. They manage themselves.
Self-awareness is not a “soft skill.” It’s a business imperative and it is the first thing we focus on in our leadership programs.
When leaders take responsibility for their growth, they free their teams from carrying it for them. That creates space for authentic dialogue, clearer decision-making, and for resilient cultures that hold together under pressure.
We’ve seen it across industries. When leaders own their blind spots (talk about them), teams thrive. When they don’t, the team unconsciously lives it out for them.
The companies that win won’t be the ones that only chase efficiency. They’ll be the ones whose leaders understand that unresolved patterns cost money, talent, and momentum.
And the leaders who do their inner work? They won’t just build healthier teams. They’ll build high-performing organizations that last.
Ready to Build Healthier Teams?
Groops for Leaders helps executives increase self-awareness and uncover their patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing. We map these habits against business goals and teach leaders how to coach as leaders so they can unlock the best in their teams while accelerating performance.
Beyond leadership development, Groops works at every level of the organization. Through team assessments, thematic analysis, custom coaching programs, and ongoing measurement, we help leaders and teams uncover hidden dynamics, strengthen trust, and build the cohesion that drives results.
The most dangerous leadership challenge isn’t the market. It’s the leader’s own unexamined patterns.