Leading Team Members Who Don’t Want a Relationship and Want to Be Left Alone to Do Their Work
The world of leadership style has seen drastic changes over the last 50 years.
We’ve gone from an exclusionary, top-down, command and control orientation to an inclusive, empowering, and consensus-oriented approach. Team members expect a very different style of leadership from those who hold the title.
At the foundation of this shift in style is the fundamental idea of a closer and more peer-like relationship between leaders and team members. Reducing the distance, status, and privilege of leaders so that they can create relationships that are more immediate, approachable, and connected has been central to this transition.
But leaders now live in a world where some team members, often socialized via social media and purely digital connectivity, reject the premise. They see no need to fully engage at a deeper level.
In a challenge to the modern orthodoxy, some team members don’t want a relationship with their leader, preferring instead to do their work independently and remotely. These team members may connect with peers, but view leaders and appeals for alignment, team chemistry, and open communication as an affront to their independence and desire to chart a different path forward.
They just want to be left alone to do their work.
How does a leader engage team members who are good at what they do but disengage in an instant and have little desire to build a deeper connection to the leader, the organization, or its vision? Not surprisingly, many leaders don’t know how to engage, manage, and lead this growing cadre of team members who turn the contemporary organization on its head with this irreverent view.
While there is no clear-cut answer, there is a growing consensus that accommodating such team members undermines the very fabric of what it means to organize in order to achieve larger goals together. Allowing a swath of team members to operate independently of the norms that create trust, chemistry, and collaboration means giving up the very goals that allow people to learn, grow, and develop in a fashion that benefits the organization and not just the individual.
When the values, norms, and cultural practices of the organization are rejected by team members, the necessary response is to insist on full engagement or to push these people toward the door. No team or organization can absorb beliefs and practices that are contrary to how it operates. Accommodating such stark differences sounds like the right thing to do, but it actually undermines the ability to bring people together to create extraordinary outcomes.
Good leaders would never tolerate or accommodate competing beliefs such as engaging disrespectfully to shake things up or sharing confidential information to create full transparency. If they did, they would know that goodwill across the group would vanish and the ability to produce great outcomes together would evaporate.
The best leaders ask team members to accommodate and adapt to the organization and not the other way around. While this does not mean leaders can’t learn or incorporate the wisdom of what others think and believe, it does mean that some accommodations destroy the foundation upon which organizations depend to achieve.
Not everyone should be accommodated. Good leaders require team members to work interdependently with them and others. Those who insist on independence are welcome to take their skills elsewhere.
You might be interested in the 15 minute conversation we conducted to unpack this entry a bit more:
https://x.com/i/spaces/1vOxwjEQVvRJB
Thanks for all the knowledge this discourse provides.
I see two nuances that seem to be missing.
First extremely gifted “artists” within a specific community such as media and entertainment, often do their best work either when left alone or catered to… I’m sure this sounds antithetical to the “team” concept, but it works well when a leader understands how to change workflows and processes that adapt to artists who, while challenging, help produce a better product and team experience when they can be left alone.
While is a “project based“ mentality, it’s challenging to maintain when the work is actually more ongoing than a specific project – – which is why both salaries and burnout are high for leaders in this environment.
The second nuance is leadership among those in the neurodiverse community. My sense is this will be a Gen Z led solution with boomers down to millennials less equipped to provide leadership skills when handling Neurodiversity compared to generation Z leaders.
I don’t see a lot of literature about nor neurodiversity, but one often finds high-performance in that community by those who need to be left alone for what are essentially medical reasons.
My experience has been team members appreciate the space given to those individuals and understand their capacity to be interdependent is more nuanced and requires more empathy.
Just like 30 years ago, many people were someone embarrassed to talk about going to see a counselor when in a work environment, I believe the generation coming finds the
opposite uncomfortable — people who don’t understand and adapt to neurodiversity on a team are often notadmired leaders.
A joyful challenge, both seem to exist within the industry I’ve chosen (media, and entertainment ) so it’s been quite a ride!
In any regard, both are nuances that look at the motivation behind the need for people to work disconnected from a team, either situationally or medically.
Just like we wouldn’t expect someone in a wheelchair to walk upstairs to a meeting, I think the challenge of the generation to come is Identifying, understanding and adapting to neurodiverse and creative individuals—- both of whom can be highly prized and unlikely to be replaced by artificial intelligence or automated systems in the years to come.
Would love to know if there is literature out there related to this topic. I’ve lived my life leading in this space and don’t see a lot out there on the topic.
Cheers to anyone who spent time reading this entire message lol!