What is an undercurrent in a team? And how do you know if yours has one?

Every team has two conversations.

The one that happens in the meeting room. And the one that happens in the corridor afterwards.

The corridor conversation is the one where people say what they actually think. Where the concern that did not get raised in the meeting gets raised with a trusted colleague. Where someone says "did you notice that?" and someone else says "yes, I noticed that too, but I didn't want to be the one to say it."

That gap, between what is said in the room and what is said outside it, is what I call the undercurrent.

What an undercurrent is

An undercurrent is not conflict. It is not dysfunction. It is not even necessarily negative.

It is the sum of everything that is felt but not spoken in a team. The unresolved tension between two team members that everyone else has quietly organised their behaviour around. The collective doubt about a strategic direction that no one has named directly. The unspoken question about whether a person in a key role is the right person for where the company is going.

Undercurrents are present in every team. The question is not whether yours has one. It is whether it is being managed or ignored.

An undercurrent that is managed makes a team stronger. The act of naming something difficult together builds exactly the kind of trust that makes teams perform at their best.

An undercurrent that is ignored does not disappear. It grows. It shapes the behaviour of everyone in the team without ever being consciously examined.

How an undercurrent forms

Undercurrents almost always start with something small. A decision that was made without enough consultation. A piece of feedback that landed harder than intended. A moment when someone spoke up and the response made them less likely to speak up again.

In a team that is moving fast, these moments rarely get processed. There is always another meeting, another deadline, another thing to build. The moment passes. The feeling does not.

Over time, small unprocessed moments accumulate into patterns. The person who was silenced once learns to self-censor. The team member whose idea was dismissed learns to stop sharing ideas. None of this is conscious. It happens slowly, through the accumulation of small signals about what is and is not welcome in this particular team.

How to recognise it in your team

Meetings that feel efficient but hollow. The agenda gets covered, decisions get made, but there is a flatness to it. No one pushes back, no one surprises you. It feels like a performance of a productive meeting rather than an actual one.

Agreement that arrives too quickly. When a proposal is met with immediate consensus, especially from people who usually have opinions, something is being suppressed. Real agreement takes time. Instant agreement is usually compliance.

Energy that changes when certain topics come up. A slight shift in the room. Someone who was animated becomes quiet. These micro-changes are data.

The same issues keep returning. A problem gets addressed in a meeting, everyone agrees on the solution, and three months later the same problem is back. The conversation addressed the surface but not the source.

Feedback that travels sideways. You hear about concerns through a third party. The person with the concern did not come to you directly. That is information about whether the direct route feels safe.

Why it matters

An undercurrent does not only cost the team in terms of wellbeing and trust. It costs performance.

Every decision made without the full information costs something. Every meeting where the real question does not get asked produces an inferior outcome. Every person who has stopped sharing what they actually think is a resource the team is not using.

The work of addressing it is not therapy. It is creating the conditions where the conversation that needs to happen can happen. Once it does, most teams are capable of correcting themselves. They did not need someone to fix them. They needed someone to open the room.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com