We think we’re supporting someone by validating their story.
Sometimes, we’re mostly helping them stay stuck.
There’s a word that took on a whole new meaning for me during my leadership training.
Colluding.
In everyday language, to collude means to conspire, to secretly be in on something.
But applied to management, coaching or any helping relationship, it points to something else.
Becoming, often without meaning to, complicit in whatever is keeping the other person from moving forward.
In practice, it looks like this.
Someone tells us about an impossible manager.
A colleague who won’t cooperate.
A team that won’t follow.
We listen. We understand. We validate.
And little by little, without realising it, we step into their story.
We confirm that the problem really is the other person.
That the situation is stuck.
That there’s nothing to be done.
We think we’re being supportive.
But sometimes, we’re helping keep the avoidance in place.
Acknowledging what someone is going through isn’t colluding.
Collusion begins when our support no longer helps them look at what they can still say, decide or do.
They avoid a difficult conversation.
And we avoid asking them why they haven’t had it.
They want reassurance.
We want to be seen as supportive.
Their avoidance becomes ours.
Collusion works because it often suits both sides:
One avoids taking action.
The other avoids challenging them, displeasing them or putting the relationship at risk.
We all do it.
As friends, colleagues, managers, HR, coaches.
And it serves no one: not the person, not the relationship, not the organisation.
The person stays trapped in a story where everything depends on others.
The relationship becomes a space where we keep confirming each other,
but where we no longer really tell each other the truth.
And the organisation multiplies conversations about problems,
without creating the ones that would actually solve them.
Not colluding doesn’t mean denying what the other person is going through.
Nor does it mean bluntly handing them back their share of responsibility.
It means helping them reclaim their share of power.
What could you say?
What request could you make?
What boundary do you need to set?
What conversation do you need to have?
How much room to act do you have, even if it’s small?
Supporting someone isn’t about helping them explain better why the situation is stuck.
It’s about helping them regain their ability to choose, to speak and to act.
Leadership isn’t only about understanding what’s holding things back.
It’s about creating the conditions for something to shift.
And sometimes, it starts with no longer talking about the other person.
And going to talk to them instead.
What about you? Have you ever realised that, while you thought you were supporting someone, you were mostly helping them stay inside their story rather than step out of it?