Engineers are trained to be rational: break a problem down, build a solution, calculate the outcome, add a safety factor for what you can't predict. That training is exactly what makes teams messy. A team isn't a calculation. It runs on relationships, and relationships are unpredictable. Most teams don't struggle because the technical work is hard. They struggle because nobody taught anyone how to manage what's underneath it: what you're saying, what you're actually thinking, and what you're doing, often three different things at once, multiplied by everyone else in the room.

Catherine grew up in South Africa, moved to the UK about twenty years ago, and got pulled aside within her first year at a new job and told she was "way too direct." The same directness that was completely normal back home read as blunt in England. Working with Americans taught her something else: they're often more direct than the British, but they deliver it with more warmth. A simple "thanks for your email, it's very interesting" can mean genuine appreciation in one culture and a polite brush-off in another. Olivia's own workaround with her German and Austrian clients: she asks them outright whether they mean a "German how are you" (a real question) or an "American how are you" (a greeting), and lets them choose.

Catherine runs a physical exercise with teams: everyone holds one end of a piece of string, tugging left and right to represent their inner dialogue, the part they're thinking but not saying out loud. Join every person's string together, and you get a tangled web that nobody can see from the outside. That's what's actually happening inside every team meeting. What people say, think, and do rarely lines up, and every extra person and every extra culture in the room adds a layer of tension nobody can point to.

Catherine's answer: it's a muscle, not a personality trait. If you can learn calculus, you can learn empathy. It takes the same willingness to feel uncomfortable and try something that might not work. The payoff is what she calls the "two plus two is five" moment. And it isn't reserved for whoever's running the team, everyone in the room is choosing how they show up, whether they hold the job title or not.

Catherine ran a quick exercise with her coaching clients: think about your last working week, what went well because of you? Almost nobody could remember being told they'd done something well. That gap connects to John Gottman's research on relationships: for every negative comment, a relationship needs roughly five positive ones to stay healthy. Teams run on the same math.

Catherine's closing line: you can insist you're right, or you can be in a relationship with the people you're working with, but rarely both at once. The exercise she uses: two people watch the same rotating finger, one sees clockwise, the other counterclockwise. Both are right. It depends on where you're standing.