Why It Always Ends This Way: Psychological Games in Leadership

Transactional analysis for creative leaders | Psychological Games

It always starts reasonably. You're working through something with somebody, and your intention is for it to go somewhere. And then, with the particular speed that these things have, something flips. The temperature changes. A look. A sentence that landed differently than it was meant to. A small recalibration in their shoulders, or yours. Something has tipped.

Suddenly the warmth has gone. You are both polite. You both know, without saying it, that the conversation has not done what either of you had hoped. Walking away, you identify a feeling you have felt before. You could not, if pressed, name it. The sense, perhaps, that this is how it goes with people far too often, with you.

You wonder, again, how you got here.

Berne's psychological games

Eric Berne, the psychiatrist who founded Transactional Analysis (TA) in the 1960s, had a name for this. He called it a game. Not in the sense of something playful, and not in the sense of something cynical or manipulative. He meant something more precise and more interesting: a series of transactions, on the surface plausible, that arrives reliably at a predictable, slightly uncomfortable payoff. Both parties contribute. Both parties usually feel, at the end, exactly what they have felt many times before.

The reason games matter for leaders is not that they are pathological. They are not. They are deeply, recognisably human, and the people who play them are often the most thoughtful and capable people in the room. The reason they matter is that they are patterned. They repeat. And in a leadership context, that repetition has a cost: the same difficulty, surfacing in slightly different costumes, year after year, slowly shaping the culture of a team without anyone quite seeing it happen.

What Berne actually meant

A game, in Berne's technical sense, has three features. There is an ostensible exchange, what looks on the surface like a normal transaction. There is an ulterior exchange, something else, communicated underneath, often outside conscious awareness. And there is a payoff: a familiar feeling that confirms an old belief, usually one held since childhood, about how the world works and who one has to be to survive in it.

The crucial point, and the one most easily lost in pop-psychology versions of this material, is that nobody is doing it on purpose. Games run on autopilot, drawing on what TA calls script: the largely unconscious life pattern each of us assembled as a small child, working out how to be loved, how to be safe, and how to make sense of the people around us. We carry our scripts into our work. The leader you are now is not separate from the child you once were.

This is why games are so persistent, and why advice like just communicate better tends not to help. The communication is not the problem. The communication is doing exactly what it is designed, at a level beneath awareness, to do.

Why creative and tech leadership is particularly game-rich

Creative and tech industries are, in my experience, unusually fertile ground for games. There are reasons for this. The stakes are high, which means the temptation to communicate ulteriorly is also high. It is often easier, to imply something than to say it. The cultural norms of many leadership groups quietly reward indirectness, and reward it more the more senior one becomes.

The power asymmetries are real, even in flat-feeling cultures. People manage their leaders. Leaders manage their boards. Founders manage their co-founders, often with a tenderness and complexity that nobody outside the relationship can see. All of this creates the conditions for ulterior transactions to flourish.

And, perhaps most importantly, creative and tech leaders are often people whose scripts contain particular themes that their work then reinforces. The founder who learned, very young, to be the one who is needed. The senior partner who learned to be loved through being good. The creative director who learned that being seen required being exceptional. These are not faults. They are, often, the very engines of success. But they are also script-level vulnerabilities, and under pressure they tend to organise themselves into games.

Three games you may recognise

Here are three brief games that appear regularly in the leadership work I do.

The first is what Berne called Why Don't You - Yes But. A leader presents a problem. The team offers solutions. Each solution is, in turn, explained away. The leader leaves frustrated that nobody can help. The team leaves convinced their offerings are not wanted. Both have confirmed, again, an old belief: that they are alone with what they carry, or that what they have to give is not enough. Nobody is lying. The problem is real. The dynamic is also real.

The second is Harried. A leader takes on more and more, partly because they can, partly because something underneath the workload is being held by it. They are exhausted. They are also, in a way they may not yet be ready to look at, fed by the exhaustion. The collapse, when it comes, often arrives as relief rather than crisis.

The third is Blemish. A leader who genuinely cares about developing their people, and who delivers feedback with apparent generosity, finds that there is always, in every review, one thing. The wins are acknowledged. The conversation is, in the end, about the thing. The people leave subtly demoralised in a way they cannot articulate. The leader believes themselves to be rigorous, and is.

In each of these, what makes the dynamic a game rather than ordinary friction is the predictability of the payoff and the unconscious nature of the contribution from both sides.

What is happening underneath

Underneath most games, the same three roles are at work: Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim. This is called the Drama Triangle. The genius of the model is its observation that games involve a switch between roles. The leader who begins as Victim of an impossible problem ends up as Persecutor of a team that failed to help. The team that began as Rescuer ends up as Victim of a leader who could not be pleased. The switch is the moment the payoff lands.

This is, often, the moment the warmth went out of the conversation. The flip. The recalibration in the shoulders. The sentence that landed differently than it was meant to. A role had just changed, and neither of you had named it.

The real question, then, is how to step out of it. I work with leaders to get into the Winner's Triangle. The Victim becomes Vulnerable: able to acknowledge difficulty without becoming helpless. The Rescuer becomes Caring: able to support without taking responsibility for another adult's experience. The Persecutor becomes Assertive: able to ask for what is needed without making the other person wrong.

The work is not to stop playing

Games will not stop. The advice to not play games is a little like the advice not to dream: technically possible, perhaps, but missing the point. We are patterned beings, and our patterns are not flaws to be eradicated but artefacts of how we learned to live.

The work, instead, is to notice. To notice the invitation when it arrives. To notice the familiar feeling at the end of the meeting. And then, having noticed, to do something different.

This is where the work gets interesting. Once you can recognise the opening move of a game you have played for years, you have a choice you did not have before. You can decline the role you are being offered. You can ask the question that interrupts the pattern. You can name, out loud, what is happening in the room, in language that does not blame anyone. You can stay in Adult contact with the person across from you, even when the old pull is to slip into Persecutor or Rescuer or Victim, and watch what happens when the script does not get its usual reply.

What happens, often, is something many leaders have not experienced for a long time: a real conversation. The kind where two people meet each other as adults, with their actual wants and limits in the room, and something genuinely new becomes possible. The kind that does not end in the familiar hollow feeling, because the familiar payoff was never collected. The kind where the team you have been quietly disappointed in turns out, when the game stops, to be more capable, more honest, and more willing than you had let yourself see.

These exchanges are richer because they are real. They are also, at first, slightly uncomfortable, because not playing the game means giving up the payoff, and the payoff, however unsatisfying, is familiar. Trading the familiar for the real is one of the harder things a leader is asked to do. It is also, in my experience, what separates leaders who keep growing from leaders who plateau.

The work benefits from a thinking partner, because the patterns that organise our leadership are by definition the patterns we cannot see by ourselves. But it begins the moment you decide that the conversation you keep walking away from is not, in fact, how it has to go.

If you find yourself, again, in the familiar feeling at the end, the question worth asking is not what is wrong with these people, or what is wrong with me. The question worth asking is: what, exactly, is the feeling at the end of this? How long have I known it? And what would it cost me to stop collecting it?

Most leaders, when they sit with those questions honestly, discover that what it would cost is the very thing keeping them stuck. And what it would open is the kind of leadership, and the kind of relationships, they came into this work to find.

Fleur Jaworski-Richards Executive Coaching

Fleur Jaworski-Richards is an executive coach and psychotherapeutic counsellor based between Chamonix and Geneva. She works with senior leaders in creative, digital, and technology sectors, bringing over 25 years of industry experience together with ICF coaching certification and UKCP psychotherapeutic training in Transactional Analysis.

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