It won't kill anyone. It's just tiring, and it wears a team down over months without anyone quite noticing. The reason I keep coming back to it is that the pull into it is there every single day, and most leaders walk straight past it — because it never looks like a crisis.

Picture the meeting. Somebody's getting blamed. Somebody else "can't." A third person quietly takes over the whole thing and will complain about it later. Voices stay reasonable. And still nothing actually moves — the decision gets pushed to next week again, the escalation lands back on your desk, and two good people have already mentally left the room.

That's the Drama Triangle. And you're the one paying for it, in the only currency that counts: results.

I run into it in almost every leadership team I coach. Good people, real pressure, decent intentions — and three roles that quietly guarantee nobody wins.

Three roles, one dead end

When people communicate badly — and this is leaders as much as anyone else — they tend to fall into one of three positions. Take one and the drama starts more or less on cue: friction, disappointment, the feeling of not being heard. Leave it running and you eventually get people checking out and relationships that don't recover. All of it because nobody in the conversation is treating anyone as an equal.

Why it spreads

The three of them keep each other going. Each one pulls the behaviour out of the others, and the whole thing turns into a loop that's weirdly hard to break — partly because it drags bystanders in too.

And the roles don't stay put. Put a bit of pressure on and they swap. The Rescuer who's covered for a colleague for half a year finally has enough: “Right, I'm done, I'm not spending any more energy on you.” One sentence and the Rescuer is now the Persecutor, the colleague is now the Victim, or fires straight back as a Persecutor of their own. That's how a leadership team can sit in "crisis mode" for the better part of a year and not be able to tell you when it started, or who started it.

Getting out: take the wheel

Everybody lands in the triangle now and then. Not a problem. The problem is setting up camp there. If your team keeps getting stuck in the same loop, somebody has to grab the wheel and step out of it — into what's usually called the Winner's Triangle. Nine times out of ten, that somebody is you.

Roughly, it goes like this. First you notice you're in it. Then you name the roles, starting with your own and not the other person's — that order matters more than it looks. Then you take responsibility for how you're behaving in the stuck conversation, and you invite the other person to do the same by actually holding them to their own patch. Now you're both aiming at a real conversation instead of the loop. And you keep giving feedback, and taking it.

This is more or less the whole job when I work with a team — moving people off blame and onto ownership, off escalation and onto accountability, off "somebody should sort this out" and onto "this is ours." People assume that's the soft end of the work. It isn't. Done properly, it's the quickest way I know to faster decisions, fewer things landing on your desk, and results that don't fall over the moment you look away.

The role nobody puts their hand up for: the Bystander

Petruska Clarkson added a fourth position, and on a team it might be the most common one going. The Bystander can see exactly what's happening and does nothing about it. “None of my business.” “Their own fault.” “Too complicated.” “I can't change anything anyway.”

The uncomfortable bit: on a team, standing back isn't neutral. You're in the room, so you're already involved, and staying quiet is a vote for leaving things exactly as they are. Doing nothing is still doing something — it just lets you feel innocent about it.

Clarkson wasn't telling everyone to go meddle in everything. Her point was narrower and sharper: naming clumsy communication when you actually see it is often the thing that gets a stuck team moving again. And if you're on that team, that's not you being noble. It's you looking after your own interests.

Which lands you with the real question

Do you dare to say something when your people are holding each other hostage in the Drama Triangle? That one move — at the right moment, without turning it into blame — is often what tips a stuck team back into a performing one. It's awkward. It also works. And it's a lot of what I end up doing with leaders.