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.

Nothing says “I don’t trust you” more than draconian HR policies that are spread like peanut butter over the employee population in an attempt to snare a few bad apples who are likely disengaged and working against the best interests of the company and the rest of the team. The solution? Improve the skill level of managers across the organization through intentional learning and development programs and make it clear through incentives that excellence is rewarded and poor performance/disengagement are not. The bad apples will opt out and head for more fertile pastures to apply their mediocre skills and display their poor work ethic for all to see.

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.

My advice is instead of looking down your nose and denigrating members of the generations that follow you, lend a hand. Use your gifts to mentor, lift up, and inspire those who are less experienced than you are.

Working with Intention: Self-reflection and the use of the five whys requires an open mind and a strong ego in order to challenge potential unconscious bias and consider answers that may not be popular or fit neatly into existing narratives. Hence, it's seldom the case that meaningful results come solely from self-reflection exercises. To make more progress, we will need the help of our coaches and mentors.

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.”

In today’s Muse, I’m going to focus on the topic of meetings. Love them or hate them, meetings are a meaningful part of corporate life and represent a significant opportunity for improvement—meaning making meetings more effective—as part of any organization’s continuous improvement practice.

I speak frequently about the benefits of adopting a continuous improvement mindset and practice—so much so that the premise of my second book, The Balanced Business, is that smooth workflows create an environment that fosters organizational accountability and allows trust to flourish. There are many preconditions to the establishment of smooth workflows, but one of the most important is to create clarity about how the work gets done in your business.

Magical thinking in business typically evidences itself as a disconnect between the capabilities, skills, and capacity of the teams that are actually doing the day-to-day work of the business, and what management believes are the capabilities, skills, and capacity of those same teams.

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.