Avoid the Trap of the Inner Circle

The Trap of the Inner Circle

So The Trap of the Inner Circle happens when a new leader needs to build a team, and it’s very easy and expedient for them to think about the people they’ve worked with in the past, perhaps people they trust already. Sometimes these are old friends, sometimes they’re family members, and they build a team around these relationships. And you inadvertently create a kind of inner circle that will tend to resist healthy conflict and will tend to, you know, ever so slightly, you know, have kind of a meeting of the minds that might be unhealthy for the work of innovation. We know from the research that the most unstable business relationships are those that originated as friends and family. More stable than that are team members who were initially just acquaintances. The most stable of those relationships tend to be the former coworkers. Former coworkers have the benefit of seeing each other’s professional skills have a shared context around work ethic. And so they tend to actually prioritize the professional work ethic over things such as your personal relationships.

The reason why building a team around friends and family is very unstable is because these are very expensive relationships. Not only do you have a business relationship, but you might even, in some cases, go home to the same person and spend the weekends with these people. At a time where you need to put some of these personal relationships on the line for the sake of the business, you’ll be much less willing to have those hard conversations with them simply because these are very expensive relationships.

We find that the message here is not if this is your team, then you should quit because you’re bound to fail. If this is your configuration, you need to spend extra time and effort to make sure that the relationship is able to create the kind of, you know, healthy disagreement that you need to be an effective team.

3 Signs to Watch For

There are a few signs that you can spot whether you’ve fallen into The Trap of the Inner Circle. The first one is “the illusion of invulnerability.” With this group that we’ve assembled here, this mighty team that we have, we’re bound to succeed and crush the competition. This kind of narrow thinking is very dangerous because then it keeps the team from spotting risks and seeing ways in which you might have to pivot.

Another sign that you fall into The Trap of the Inner Circle could be “unquestioned beliefs.” This might be, you know, feedback that’s brushed aside, ideas that, you know, aren’t even tested for whether they are ethical or not. And the challenge here is that when teams just go about the work without, you know, having space to stop and ask the hard questions, then you could be falling into a lot of these mistakes along the way.

A related sign is self-censorship, where perhaps individuals on your team feel like they can’t really say certain things in the presence of the broader team. Perhaps there’s a fear that an idea, you know, isn’t quite going to sit well with the people with power. You then create this “illusion of unanimity” where people will then believe that everyone is in agreement about a certain decision or a certain topic because no one’s speaking up.