The Uncomfortable Truth, No. 5
Ask someone outside the credit function what the collections team does, and you will get a version of the same answer almost every time.
They chase people for money.
It is reductive, and it is also not entirely wrong. But listen to what it does not include. It does not include the customer relationship that was preserved because a collections professional handled a difficult conversation with enough skill and empathy to reach a payment arrangement rather than an escalation. It does not include the early warning signal that was surfaced because someone on the team noticed a change in payment pattern before it became a loss. It does not include the business that survived a cash flow crisis because the collections team worked with them rather than against them at the critical moment.
None of that is in the answer. Because none of that is what the team is known for.
Now ask someone inside the collections team how they are seen by the rest of the business, and the answer is often the same: as the people who say no. As the ones who make things difficult. As the department you call when something has already gone wrong. As the team that delivers bad news for a living.
The uncomfortable question is what happens to a team that lives inside that identity long enough.
The identity the role assigns
Every role carries an implicit identity. Sales carries the identity of the winner, the closer, the person who makes things happen. Operations carries the identity of the deliverer, the one who keeps the engine running. Finance carries the identity of the scorekeeper, the function that tells the business how it is doing.
Credit and collections carries the identity of the brake pedal.
That identity is not arbitrary. It reflects something real about the function’s purpose. Credit exists to introduce discipline. Collections exists to recover what is owed. Both are, by design, corrective functions operating in the space between what was agreed and what is happening. The identity is built into the brief.
But identity has consequences. And the consequences of being the brake pedal, held over time, at the level of the team rather than the individual, are rarely examined honestly.
When a team is consistently positioned as the bearer of bad news, something begins to happen that is subtle at first and then increasingly difficult to reverse. The team starts to see itself through the lens of the identity it has been assigned. Not consciously, not in a single moment, but gradually, through accumulation. Through the way internal stakeholders respond when the team calls. Through the slight shift in tone that happens in cross functional meetings when credit or collections raises a concern. Through the absence of celebration when the team does something well, and the reliable presence of scrutiny when something goes wrong.
Over time, the team internalizes a specific belief: that their job is to be the problem in the room. Not to solve problems. Not to protect the business. Not to deliver value. To be the obstacle. The constraint. The department that complicates things.
That belief, once internalized, shapes everything. How the team communicates with stakeholders. How individual members talk about their work in professional settings. How leaders in the function advocate for resources. How new team members are onboarded into the culture and what they absorb about what the role is actually for.
And it shapes something else, something more personal and more damaging. It shapes how the people inside the function feel about what they do every day.
What the culture becomes
A team that has fully absorbed the identity of the problem bringer does not arrive at that point dramatically. It gets there through a series of small adjustments, each of which seems rational in isolation.
The team stops volunteering perspective in cross functional discussions because the perspective is rarely welcomed. It stops trying to reframe its contribution as strategic because the reframing never quite lands. It stops celebrating internal wins because the wins are invisible and celebrating invisible things feels performatively hollow after a while. It develops a private language, shared inside the team but not outside it, that is often wry, often dark, and that functions as a pressure valve for a working environment that offers no official mechanism for processing its own difficulty.
That private language is worth paying attention to. It is not a sign of dysfunction. It is a sign of adaptation. Teams under sustained pressure develop internal cohesion mechanisms, shared humor, shared cynicism, shared shorthand for experiences that are difficult to explain to outsiders. Those mechanisms are not inherently harmful. In fact, they are often what holds a team together through genuinely difficult stretches.
But they have a shadow side. When the private language becomes the dominant language, when the cynicism becomes the default register rather than the release valve, when the internal cohesion is built more around shared grievance than shared purpose, the culture has crossed a line it rarely crosses back over without deliberate intervention.
At that point, the team is no longer adapting to its environment. It has become its environment. The negativity that was originally a product of the work has become a feature of the team itself. And new members who join do not find a team that does difficult work with resilience. They find a culture that has concluded the difficulty is the point.
That conclusion is the single most corrosive thing that can happen to a credit or collections team. More damaging than high turnover, because turnover can be addressed. More damaging than poor performance metrics, because metrics can be improved. A team that has concluded its purpose is to be the problem has lost the thing that no metric measures and no training program restores easily: its own belief in the value of what it does.
What the leader owes the team
There is a version of this conversation that ends with the observation that collections environments are just hard, and some people are suited to them and some are not, and the role of leadership is to hire the right people and manage out the wrong ones.
That version is inadequate. Not because hiring and managing performance are unimportant, but because they address the symptom while leaving the cause entirely intact.
The cause is an identity that the organization assigned and the team absorbed, in the absence of a leader who named it clearly enough to prevent it.
What the leader owes the team is not immunity from the difficulty of the work. That is not available. The work is difficult, and any honest accounting of what credit and collections involves has to include that. What the leader owes the team is an honest naming of what they are carrying, combined with a deliberate, sustained effort to build a counter narrative that is true.
The counter narrative is not motivational fiction. It is not a poster on the wall that says your team is the backbone of the business, accompanied by no structural change in how the team is positioned or recognized. Practitioners see through that immediately, and it makes things worse, because it adds condescension to the existing difficulty.
The counter narrative is something more demanding than that. It is the leader saying, in specific terms, to the team and to the organization around the team: here is what this function actually does, here is the value it produces that nobody is currently naming, and here is why that value matters to the business in concrete commercial terms. And then repeating it, not once but consistently, in every forum where the function’s identity is being formed.
It is making the invisible wins visible. Not generically, but specifically. Not “the team did a great job this quarter” but “this team identified a risk that would have cost the business this specific amount, and here is how they did it.” Specificity is what converts a gesture into a belief. And building a team’s belief in its own contribution is the foundational leadership act in an environment where the structure of the work undermines that belief every single day.
Name it. Then move.
If you lead a credit or collections team, here is the most useful thing this post can offer you.
Name what the team is carrying before you try to change anything else.
Not in a way that confirms the negative identity, but in a way that acknowledges the reality of the environment honestly enough that the team believes you actually see it. That you understand what it costs to deliver difficult news all day, every day. That you know what the private language sounds like and why it exists. That you are not operating from a comfortable distance above the difficulty but from an accurate view of it.
That naming, done well, does something that nothing else can replicate. It gives the team permission to stop pretending the environment is fine when it is not. And it creates the only foundation on which something better can actually be built.
From there, the work is specific. Build the wins into the rhythm of the team. Make the counter narrative a standing agenda item, not a quarterly gesture. Change how the team talks about itself in cross functional settings, starting with how you, as the leader, talk about it when the team is not in the room. Push for the organizational recognition that the function deserves, using the language of commercial impact rather than departmental advocacy.
None of that is quick. But all of it is available. And it starts with a leader who is willing to look at what is happening to their team honestly enough to name it.
The team that delivers bad news for a living deserves a leader who tells it the truth.
The Uncomfortable Truth is a weekend series on the real experience of working in credit and collections. Published every weekend through December 2026. theheadofcredit.com
