The Silent Culture Killer in Your Team (And What to Do About It)

In this episode of *The TripleGoal Podcast (previously The Secret Life of Great Leaders)*, **Michael Bunting** speaks with **David Woollcott**, CEO of King Living, a family-owned Sydney business founded in 1977 that designs, manufactures and retails furniture, with showrooms around the world, two large factories and around 1,300 people. David is the company’s second CEO. He joined at the end of 2022, when a number of people left within months, battered and bruised after COVID, and he restructured, put new people in new roles and has had a stable leadership team for about three years. The conversation began on a flight, where the two got chatting about culture and leadership and Michael, who did not yet know David was a CEO, invited him onto the podcast. Together, they explore triangulation, the pattern where people take a problem with one colleague to a third person to sort out. Michael sets the frame with Red Zone and Green Zone thinking, the research of Bowen and Friedman, and the drama triangle of victim, helper and perpetrator. David describes what happens when a leader steps in to smooth things over: the organisation gets infantilised and the leader becomes the team’s counsellor. His own tactic is a rhetorical question, “Have you met?”, and he often invites the other person into the room live, which tends to take the topic from a volume of eight down to a two. He shares the mistake that taught him the most, forwarding a colleague’s detailed email to the executive it criticised, which dropped trust from eight out of ten to two out of ten and took weeks of one-on-one conversations to rebuild. Along the way they cover creative tension versus reactive tension, how ego, fear and ambition shape leadership behaviour, Michael’s three parts of self-regulation (see the Red Zone pattern, own it, move into healthier behaviour), and a practical process for bringing two people together: start from the shared goal, surface the assumptions, ask each person to own their part, and have them repeat back what they heard in the same words. It closes on discomfort. Michael reflects that great leadership comes down to managing discomfort and tension in a mature way, and that adult development research points to how people relate to discomfort as a signal to grow. David adds perspective: his father’s advice to pull back just before it hurts, a reminder that family and health matter more than work, and the view that giving someone hard feedback, backed by the views of colleagues, is a way of showing them care. Michael adds that a leader who admits their own fallibility makes it safe for others to do the same. If you’ve ever been tempted to smooth things over by playing go-between, this episode offers a practical alternative, starting with a deceptively simple question: have you met?