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.