A: This is one of those answers that is going to be good for your business and bad for you personal health at the same time, because implementing it will require you to internalize a lot of stress. I just want to be clear about that right up front.

OK, for a moment, let’s fantasize about our ideal world: employees care about what they do and put everything they’ve got into being a success. Getting it right is more important than the clock; everyone works to get the job done. Employees have full trust and confidence in the company’s leadership, and they know, without asking, that the rewards for their hard work will be there, whether in the form of a random day off, a company-bought lunch, or a trip to Las Vegas. This arrangement is unspoken, the result of mutual trust, clear, shared goals, and a team of intrinsically motivated individuals.

Now let’s detour quickly into theory-land. The leader in this utopian workplace described above is what is known in my field as a transformational leader, a term coined by Bernard Bass to describe someone who is able to get people to transcend parochial interests to pursue a common vision. The “opposite” of transformational leadership, or at least what many business owners threaten to use when their employees start taking loose company policies for granted, is transactional leadership. This is where everything done between a boss and subordinate is done on a quid pro quo (or tit-for-tat!) basis. Both styles can work, but they result in very different corporate cultures, and very different boss-subordinate relationships. For the record, there are more laissez-faire styles of leadership, too, in which owners, bosses, and other authority figures basically sit back and don’t engage until a problem comes up, if at all.

At last, it’s time to discuss reality.

If your office is clearing out at 5pm, that’s feedback that the conditions of a “transformed” team have not yet been met. It’s feedback that team members lack either the mutual trust, shared goals, or intrinsic motivation to go beyond their self-interest for the good of the whole. Sounds bad? Hang on, it gets worse: what you want to do–yell at those incomprehensibly lazy slobs and threaten the ingrates with the removal of privileges until they fix their attitudes or do XY&Z–is, by definition, transactional leadership, and doing this pretty much nails the coffin shut on the nirvana of your fantasy world. At least, for a while.

Uh-oh. You yelled at them already, didn’t you. Don’t worry, you didn’t know. Just like they didn’t know that there was anything bigger for them to latch onto beyond their job responsibilities, or that the secret to making their jobs truly enjoyable was simply to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Truly, don’t sweat it. Going from transactional to transformational is not on the level of asking a tiger to change its stripes. The shift is evolutionary. It will take a little time, but you–and your team–can make the shift.

As the team’s leader, your biggest challenge in achieving (and holding) that utopian state of the transformed team is going to be working against instinct. When others seem to abuse your loyalty, you’re going to want to take your ball and go home… especially if you started the business. What you should be doing instead is recognizing that in your success, you gave birth to something separate from you, with character, aspirations, and mass all its own, and that as with living creatures, the formative years come after gestation… they don’t run concurrently. So now that you’ve given birth to it, you’ve got to nurture the organization and teach it everything you know until it can survive by itself.

Frustrating? You bet. You wanted to give birth to a fully mature organization, I know. You saw yourself coasting by now. Believe me, I get it. I told you this wouldn’t necessarily be good for you personally. But right now, it’s not fun for your employees, either. Those 20- and 30-somethings want to be part of something big and important. They want to contribute to a meaningful cause, and they feel lost because when they’re watching the clock, ready to skip out at 4:59, there is something within them that is going unfulfilled. They can’t put their fingers on it, but they feel it. (And if they don’t, fire them. You can light a fire under people’s butts, but you cannot light the fire in their bellies.) You, on the other hand, know exactly what that something is, and even if you can’t articulate it, you know how to scratch that itch. OK, maybe their passions don’t burn as brightly as yours. Or maybe they’re not in a position to take the risks you took to move ahead. So what? Assuming you hired good people, the fact that they haven’t internalized their commitment to your goals yet isn’t a problem; it’s simply a state of being. Everything you do now should be in the spirit of creating an atmosphere of mutual trust, shared vision, and intrinsic motivation… because my guess is that you’re about as disinterested in a command-and-control organization as they are.

Easier said than done, but it’s the only formula that works if you intend to have fun with your work and create something that can outlive you in the long run. Next up: the employees’ responsibilities in this equation.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Leadership