This week, we’re going to continue the discussion on the cultural impact of return-to-office policies and their impact on employee engagement by looking at the other side of the coin—the actions of employees. When talking about organizational culture and employee engagement, it’s critical to recognize that employee engagement is a two-way street.

Today we’re going to continue our exploration of the growth trap. I define the growth trap as seeking business growth for the sake of business growth with little regard for operational or cultural implications.

However, like the budgeting process, c-suite magical thinking poses the biggest threat to value addition in M&A and can quickly turn what on the surface looks like a great idea and a big value-add into a transaction that ends up destroying corporate value.

Everyone wins when “my word is my bond” becomes woven into the fabric of your organizational culture. Accountability and trust simultaneously improve as the nooks and crannies to hide half-truths, speculation, and agendas that run counter to the company North Star become fewer and farther between.

As time passes, the business matures, growth slows, and entropy sets in. Leaders and team members pull their heads up and take a look around at the state of their business. The common refrain goes something like this: “Wow, how did our culture deviate so far from our original intention? We need to get back to growth mode, but we also need a culture that will facilitate further growth, not impede it!”

So how do we balance control and empowerment? How do we create a high trust, high accountability workplace? We do so by installing a clear set of guardrails and guidelines within which the organization can function. Said differently, we install a “management operating system.”

The point I’m driving at is that while you as a leader may do just fine with the ambiguity of unfinished goals—simultaneously cleaning up last year’s mess and rolling out shiny new initiatives, many of your people detest loose ends, unfinished business, and incomplete goals.

What do your people want (other than more money)? They want clarity, autonomy, empowerment, respect, and organizational accountability. They want to make a difference and do good, meaningful work. They want to know that leadership cares and that everyone in the company is rowing in the same direction with the same commitment and vigor that they apply to their own work.

This week, I’d like to drill a bit deeper into the benefits of diversity versus uniformity and a key trap leaders can easily fall into. We’ll call it the expectations trap. Just as leaders can be tempted to reduce friction and drag with a homogeneous “Team Yes” by hiring people who look and think like they do, it’s also easy to project expectations for dedication, effort, productivity, engagement, and results onto others.

Applied in a business context, a team that possesses a strong sense of balance performs well under pressure and is not buffeted nearly as violently by the winds of change and external competitive pressures compared to a team that lacks a keen sense of balance. But what does balance look like in business?

So today’s lesson is this. Yes, as a leader, people are going to talk about you. Someone is probably talking about you right now. The good news is that you have control about what they’re saying and the irony is that you’ll sleep better and your ears will stop buzzing if you’re transparent, authentic, clear, and structured. Oh, and sprinkling in a bit of humility, a sense of humor, and a dash of vulnerability won’t hurt either.

In a healthy team or organization, there is a spirit of learning and continuous improvement that is shared by each individual. There is shared purpose, strong communication, a sense of stewardship, well-defined goals and standard work, cross-training, backups, smooth handoffs, empowerment to pull the Andon Cord (to stop the assembly line in the case of an issue), and a laser focus on delighting the customer.

Requiring everyone to sit next to each other in a physical space will not drive an enlightened corporate culture—giving individuals and teams meaningful work and a sense of purpose is what matters.