Executive Coach Dr. Janice Perkins Challenges Leaders and Executive Teams to Stop Chasing Buy-In and Start Building Chemistry

Spain won the 2026 World Cup with the deciding goal coming in extra time from a substitute. Ferran Torres joined a team already moving in sync, anticipating one another, filling space, and functioning as a unified system. Throughout the tournament, analysts and fans alike pointed to the Spaniards as a clear example of team chemistry.

Executive coach and leadership communication scholar Janice Perkins, PhD has spent years studying what makes that kind of coordination possible, not just on playing fields, but inside leadership relationships and executive teams.

She believes many organizations are chasing the wrong thing. They are chasing buy in and engagement when they should be building chemistry.

Perkins' doctoral research at Kansas State University examined chemistry inside executive coaching relationships, studying what happens when people move beyond simply communicating and begin thinking, responding and creating together.

Her findings challenge a common assumption: chemistry is not simply luck, charisma, personality fit or something that appears after people have known and trusted one another for years.

It emerges through identifiable relational conditions.

“People can feel the difference between being persuaded to come along and actually wanting to move together,” Perkins says. “Buy in is an outcome. The more important question is whether you've created the conditions that make people want to participate.”

Perkins identified six of those conditions, which she calls the Six Gates of Chemistry: Legitimacy, Dignity, Containment, Agency, Attunement and Orientation.

Spain's championship run, Perkins argues, is what an organization looks like when enough of those gates are open. Players occupied space because they trusted a teammate would fill the next one. Nobody was surprised by anybody. That kind of coordination doesn't come from a single strategy session; it compounds over time, the same way Perkins says chemistry compounds and creates continuity inside a well-built executive team or company culture.

Most organizations, by contrast, spend enormous energy trying to manufacture alignment through presentations, strategy sessions and persuasion, fighting what Perkins calls relational drag: the invisible energy consumed by ego, distrust, unclear roles, and the constant effort required to navigate one another.

“When chemistry is present, people don't simply work together,” Perkins says. “They begin to move together and produce more than the sum of their parts.”

Resistance decreases. Rhythm develops. People anticipate rather than merely react to one another. Individual effort begins turning into collective momentum.

But more communication does not necessarily create better coordination.

Perkins' ideas on chemistry have started to draw notice well beyond her own client list. She uses her expertise in coaching chemistry to train other coaches through Coach Training EDU, was a contestant on the inaugural season of Top Coach, and her work appears in the 2024 book The Intersection of Leadership and Coaching. In 2026, her company was named Midwest Company of the Year for Leadership Development, and MSN.com named her one of the leadership speakers to follow.

Those accolades reinforce a larger body of work that Perkins is now bringing into executive coaching, speaking, leadership development and executive team engagements. Her research suggests chemistry can travel. Relational patterns developed in one strong relationship can influence how leaders interact with peers, employees and stakeholders, spreading a different quality of interaction throughout an organization.

Highly qualified, she is a member of 100 Coaches and holds Master-level status with the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches. Through executive coaching, executive team engagements, workshops and consulting, Perkins helps leaders recognize the invisible dynamics shaping how their people work together and intentionally create conditions for stronger chemistry.

For leaders exhausted from trying to secure buy in and create engagement, her message is simple:

Stop asking, “How do I get them on board?”

Start asking, “How can I get my team to “click”?”