The Hunger Games Effect
There's a pattern I keep seeing in organisations right now. And it worries me.
Two leaders pulling in different directions. Not because they don't care. Not because they're not capable. But because the external message about what was expected wasn't clear enough. And in that gap, the confusion found somewhere to land.
Not on the system that created it. On each other.
I see this play out in a lot of contexts. And it almost never starts with the people. It starts with the pressure.
External change that isn't well communicated. Shifting expectations that leave people guessing. Competing demands that force impossible prioritisation. Comparison that pits teams against each other. Blame that rolls downhill and lands on the people closest to the work.
And when that pressure arrives without clarity, without context, without enough support to make sense of it, teams do what humans do under stress. They look for certainty where they can find it. They protect their patch. They lead from their own interpretation because nobody has given them a shared one.
And suddenly people who were previously good together are working at cross purposes. Not because they don't care. Because they're trying to navigate something genuinely unclear, and doing it without a shared map.
That's the hunger games effect. When external pressure creates internal competition. When the real disruption is coming from outside but it's playing out inside. When the culture you worked hard to build starts fracturing not from the inside out, but from the outside in.
And the tragedy of it is this. The team often doesn't realise what's happening until the damage is already done. Until the trust has eroded. Until the shortness and the distance and the quiet pulling apart have become the new normal.
So what does it take to stop it?
It takes someone being willing to name it. To stand in front of the team and say, the disruption we're feeling isn't us. It's coming from outside. And we're not going to let it take our culture with it.
That's a leadership act. A quiet, deliberate, powerful one.
It means getting clear internally even when the external message is muddy. Agreeing on what you know, what you don't know, and how you'll move forward together until the clarity arrives. Not waiting for permission to be a coherent team.
It means protecting the relationships. Especially when the pressure is highest. Because the relationship between colleagues, between leaders, between a team is the thing that holds everything else together. And once it fractures under pressure it takes far longer to repair than it did to build.
And it means resisting the pull to compare, to blame, to turn inward in ways that cost the culture. Because other organisations are not your competition. Other teams are not your benchmark. The only question worth asking is, are we doing right by the people in front of us and the people beside us?
External pressure is real. The demands are real. The confusion is real. But so is the culture you've built. And it's worth more than any external expectation that wasn't communicated clearly enough to be worth fracturing over.
Don't let the outside in.
The Conversation
Is this pattern showing up in your team right now? How are you managing it? I'd love to hear.
Go with Care this week
Mary-Anne