The Hidden Leadership Loyalties Draining Your Executive Power
- Leksana TH
- Jun 8, 2025
- 6 min read
How systemic coaching reveals the internal contradictions that traditional executive development misses
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. — Carl Jung
A senior executive recently told me: "I know exactly what decision to make, but something inside stops me from acting." Months later, his hesitation during a critical organizational transition created significant missed opportunities. The technical analysis was flawless. The strategic rationale was sound. Yet something deeper—invisible entanglements from his family system—constrained his leadership at the crucial moment.
Leadership today demands adaptability, emotional intelligence, decisiveness under uncertainty, and the ability to hold paradox. Yet beneath even the most capable leader's performance often lies a quiet tension—unacknowledged patterns, invisible loyalties, and internal contradictions that drain clarity, courage, and authentic connection.
After fifteen years coaching leaders, I began noticing a pattern: leaders would gain insights, develop skills, even shift behaviors—yet something fundamental remained unchanged. They understood what to do but couldn't consistently execute. The breakthrough came when I learned about systemic intelligence and began exploring how family system dynamics create invisible constraints on executive effectiveness.
The Cost of Invisible Entanglements
This isn't about being too soft or too nice. It's about the internal tug-of-war many leaders face but rarely name: the part that wants to be firm and the part that avoids conflict; the voice that insists on control and the one that fears being seen as authoritarian; the drive for results and the need to preserve relationships.
These patterns show up in various ways across executive contexts. I recently worked with a managing director who showed a tendency to delay critical decisions during organizational transitions, often seeking broader consensus even when speed was essential. Through systemic work, we discovered an unconscious entanglement with family trauma around quick decisions leading to exclusion. The delays weren't strategic caution—they were loyalty to unresolved family fate.
In another case, a successful regional leader found herself repeatedly creating similar team dynamics across different organizations—certain types of people tended to end up marginalized, yet she couldn't see the pattern. The dynamic mirrored an unresolved exclusion in her family system that was unconsciously organizing her leadership relationships.
When Family System Loyalties Become Leadership Blind Spots
These internal contradictions aren't competency gaps or behavioral patterns to be modified. They're expressions of deeper systemic loyalties—unconscious entanglements with unresolved family system dynamics that once served survival and belonging but now constrain executive effectiveness.
In constellation work, loyalty doesn't mean allegiance or dedication. It means the unconscious tendency to follow family fate patterns—to become entangled with excluded members, unprocessed trauma, or incomplete family stories. When a family member was cast out, suffered exclusion, or carried unresolved burdens, subsequent generations often unconsciously repeat these patterns as a form of belonging to the family system.
Another client, a managing director in a family-owned industrial conglomerate, struggled with what his team experienced as micromanagement. He saw himself as simply "being responsible." Through systemic work, we discovered he was unconsciously carrying the fate of a grandfather who had lost everything through what the family perceived as insufficient oversight. To delegate felt, in his family system, like abandoning the very vigilance that ensured survival.
These loyalties operate beneath conscious awareness, organizing leadership behavior in ways that often contradict a leader's conscious intentions and strategic understanding.
The Systemic Principles Leaders Need to Access
Systemic intelligence reveals that healthy organizations—like healthy family systems—operate according to four natural principles: Purpose, Place or Belonging, Exchange, and Order. When these principles flow naturally, organizations thrive. When they're disrupted by unresolved systemic dynamics, dysfunction emerges.
The same principles apply at the individual level. Leaders need clear connection to Purpose, the ability to occupy their proper Place in organizational hierarchy, healthy patterns of Exchange with teams and stakeholders, and respect for natural Order in relationships and decision-making.
Yet unconscious loyalties to family system fate can prevent leaders from accessing these natural capacities. They may know intellectually what their organization needs, but find themselves unable to act in alignment with these systemic principles.
The Systemic Approach to Leadership Transformation
Systemic coaching addresses the invisible entanglements that organize behavior beneath conscious intention. It creates space for leaders to see and release unconscious loyalties that no longer serve their current leadership context.
This isn't therapy, and it doesn't require extensive exploration of family history. It's about leadership liberation—freeing executives from invisible constraints that limit their natural capacity for effective decision-making and authentic connection.
When underlying systemic entanglements remain unconscious, leaders often find themselves reverting to familiar patterns despite their best efforts to change. One executive told me: "I can maintain new approaches for about six weeks, then something invisible pulls me back to the old patterns, even when I know they're not serving the organization."
Systemic approaches don't eliminate these patterns—they bring them into conscious awareness so leaders can choose responses appropriate to their current organizational context rather than unconsciously repeating family fate.
Recognition Across Organizational Contexts
These dynamics become particularly visible during high-stakes transitions—mergers and acquisitions, leadership succession, organizational restructuring, crisis response. When familiar structures are disrupted and pressure is highest, unconscious loyalties exert their strongest influence on leadership behavior.
During a recent post-acquisition integration, the acquiring company's CEO kept deferring critical decisions about organizational structure. Eighteen months later, projected synergies remained unrealized, key talent was leaving, and market share was declining. Through systemic work, we discovered he was unconsciously carrying a family pattern where rapid decisions had led to devastating loss. His hesitation wasn't strategic caution—it was loyalty to family trauma that equated quick action with danger.
The integration required speed and decisiveness, but his family system loyalty made these feel impossible and reckless.
What Becomes Possible When Loyalties Are Revealed
The moment of shift often comes when leaders recognize that the internal forces they've been fighting aren't personal weaknesses but expressions of deep belonging to family system. Once these loyalties are acknowledged and honored for what they once served, leaders often experience profound release.
They report that decision-making becomes clearer, relationships more authentic, and leadership feels less effortful. Their teams notice the difference immediately—meetings flow differently, communications become more direct, and organizational energy shifts in ways that are felt rather than analyzed.
When leaders resolve internal systemic contradictions, executive teams report significant improvements: increased satisfaction with leadership quality, leaders becoming role models others aspire to follow, and enhanced organizational capacity to navigate complexity. Most importantly, there's improved balance between task achievement and relational health—the hallmark of sustainable leadership.
The Invitation
Some practical indicators that leaders might benefit from systemic approaches:
You find yourself avoiding necessary conversations despite knowing exactly what needs to be said
You default to control because trusting others feels too risky, even when you intellectually know delegation would be more effective
You over-function in relationships while team members consistently under-function
You feel secretly resentful or drained, even when outwardly successful and appreciated
You sense there's a deeper pattern organizing your choices, but can't identify what's driving it
Leaders don't need fixing—they need freedom from unconscious entanglements that constrain their natural capacity for effective leadership.
Conclusion
The challenges facing leaders today—unprecedented complexity, volatility, the need for both performance and authentic connection—require more than new competencies or updated frameworks. They require examination of what shapes decision-making beneath conscious intention.
If you're a leader who sometimes wonders, "Why do I hold back when I know what's needed?" or "Why do I repeatedly create the same organizational dynamics despite my best efforts to change?"—the answer may not lie in additional skills or better strategies.
It may lie in understanding the invisible loyalties that organize your leadership choices at levels deeper than conscious intention.
Systemic coaching offers a way to explore this territory: not to fix the leader, but to free them from unconscious constraints that limit their range, authenticity, and effectiveness.
"Once we see the pattern, we can choose differently. Once we honor the loyalty, we can release its grip."
About the Author Leksana TH is a systemic coach, leadership facilitator, and organizational development consultant with ICF credentials at the PCC level. He specializes in integrating systemic intelligence with executive coaching, working with C-suite leaders across Asia to reveal and resolve the deeper dynamics that constrain leadership effectiveness. He has trained extensively in systemic constellations and organizational dynamics with leading practitioners in the field.
