What Your Team’s Behaviour Is Actually Telling You

You have seen it before. A colleague goes quiet after a promotion is announced.  Someone stays online until midnight, replying to messages nobody asked them to answer that late.

A teammate takes on every difficult client because they are “good with people,” and slowly disappears into the role of everyone’s emotional support.

None of these people are being dramatic. None of them are being difficult. They are showing you, in real time, workplace behaviour patterns that were written into the nervous system long before they ever walked into an office.

This week I have been looking closely at how the dynamics I usually write about inside families and relationships show up just as clearly inside teams and workplaces. The setting changes. The wiring does not.

Every workplace behaviour pattern in this piece starts with the same wiring. Humans are wired to read closeness as safety and distance as risk.

This starts in childhood, where being close to a parent’s attention was, quite literally, how a child stayed fed, protected, and secure.

I have written before about how jealousy, envy, and resentment are often not character flaws but old survival responses, triggered the moment we sense someone else is getting the closeness we associate with safety.

The workplace does not erase this wiring. It just gives it a new stage. A manager’s attention becomes the modern equivalent of a parent’s approval.

Proximity to leadership starts to feel, at a nervous system level, like proximity to safety itself.

These workplace behaviour patterns show up clearly once you know what to look for. 

When leadership leans on a small circle of people, it is rarely intentional exclusion. In fast moving teams, managers route urgent work to whoever they trust and whoever is already close at hand. From a leadership seat, this looks like operational efficiency.

From an excluded employee’s seat, it can feel identical to being the unfavoured sibling, watching someone else get the closeness that signals belonging.

I explored this same architecture in Understanding One Way Friendships, where an imbalance in attention, however unintentional, still registers in the body as rejection.

The employee’s response is rarely resentment on the surface. More often it is the opposite. They overwork, reply at 9pm and say yes to everything, hoping visibility will restore the safety they have lost.

This is not dedication in the way it looks. It is a system trying to win back proximity the only way it knows how.

None of this shows up on a workload report. An employee who never switches off looks committed, not strained. A high performer who absorbs every difficult conversation on the team looks capable, not depleted.

The cost is invisible until it becomes attrition, disengagement, or a quiet, unexplained drop in output from someone who used to be reliable. The data backs this up.

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement has fallen to its lowest level since the pandemic, and put the cost of that disengagement at close to 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity worldwide last year, around 9 percent of global GDP [1].

That is not a resilience problem. Resilience training does not fix a structural pattern, and the numbers show it.

The good news is that both the person and the organisation have real, practical levers here, not just awareness.

For the individual, the most useful shift is learning to stop over-explaining and over-proving. A calm, brief, consistent response, regardless of how a day is going, protects your energy without costing you your visibility or your standing.

I wrote about a version of this same principle in When Choosing Peace Makes You The Villain, where the goal was never to withdraw, only to stop performing for approval that was never guaranteed in the first place. The same applies at your desk as it does at your dinner table.

For the organisation, the fix sits a level up. Proximity blind task allocation. Visible, tracked workload distribution. Recognition systems that do not depend on who happens to be in the room when credit gets handed out.

None of this requires calling anyone out or naming any culture as broken. It requires building systems where closeness to a manager stops being the accidental currency of value.

I am currently designing the next stage of this work into something more concrete:

A platform that helps both employees and organisations navigate exactly these patterns, giving individuals private, personalised support, while giving companies anonymised, aggregate insight into where structural pressure is building before it becomes attrition.

The aim is simple. Give people something private and useful for themselves, and give companies a way to see the system, not just the symptoms.

It is early. But the pattern behind it is not new to me. I have spent years mapping how conditioned compliance and grief show up when someone finally stops over-giving in a relationship that never asked them to.

The workplace is simply the next room these behaviour patterns walk into.

If you have felt any of this in your own team, on either side of it, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Brian Jones writes on change, transformation, and the psychology of boundaries at brianmj.com. This piece continues a series bridging his work on family and relationship dynamics into organisational wellbeing.

Source [1] Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx