One of the most common questions I hear from leaders is this:
“How can I get my team to do what I need them to do?”
My response is almost always another question:
“How would you feel if someone was trying to get you to do something you didn’t want to do?”
There’s usually a pause.
And then a small but significant shift.
Most people immediately recognise the answer: resistance, disengagement, frustration, or quiet compliance at best. Very rarely genuine commitment.
That’s often the moment when a penny drops. Leadership doesn’t work the way many of us were unconsciously taught to believe it does.
Control is a Comforting Fantasy
The idea that leaders are “in control” is deeply embedded in organisational culture. Titles, hierarchies, reporting lines, KPIs all of these subtly reinforce the notion that authority equals compliance.
But anyone who has actually led people knows this isn’t true.
You can control processes.
You can enforce consequences.
You can apply pressure.
What you cannot control is motivation, engagement, or genuine ownership. These are internal states. They arise from meaning, alignment, and personal choice and not from authority. Leaders can impose consequences, set expectations, and design structures, but they cannot command commitment. The moment commitment is forced, it ceases to be commitment and becomes compliance.
There is a subtle yet crucial difference between control and influence. Control seeks to determine an outcome. It aims to eliminate uncertainty and secure a specific result. Influence, on the other hand, works with autonomy rather than against it. And yet, influence is often misunderstood as a softer form of control, a more sophisticated way of getting people to do what you want.
But true influence does not guarantee that others will choose your preferred path.
To influence someone is not to override their will. It is to illuminate possibilities. It is to articulate context, clarify consequences, and reveal meaning in such a way that the other person can see more clearly and then decide what is right for them at that time. Influence is invitational. It expands awareness and opens a space in which choice becomes conscious.
You can take someone along a garden path, help them see the landscape, the trade-offs, the larger purpose. You can connect their values to the broader direction. You can remove confusion and reduce friction. But at the end of that path, the choice remains theirs.
Influence requires humility, because you must accept that even after your best effort, the answer may still be no. It requires confidence, because you trust that clarity and alignment are more powerful than pressure. And it requires patience, because influence works through understanding, not force.
Where Misalignment Really Comes From
In many cases, resistance or disengagement isn’t about laziness, incompetence, or attitude. It’s about misalignment.
Often, team members:
Don’t understand the broader vision or mission of the organisation
Can’t see how their role connects to something meaningful
Know the vision intellectually but don’t resonate with it personally
And sometimes, this distinction is important to understand; they can’t align with it in its current form. And that is what can be worked on.
But this is usually where leaders jump too quickly to conclusions:
“I hired the wrong person.”
“They’re not a cultural fit.”
“Maybe this isn’t the right role for them.”
Before going down that path, it’s worth slowing down and investigating a bit more rather than coming to conclusions from a surface-level appearance.
Start With What Matters to Them
Alignment doesn’t begin with persuasion or pressure. It begins with curiosity.
Instead of asking, “How do I get them to do this?”
Ask, “What actually matters to this person?”
What motivates them?
What do they care about?
What do they need in order to do their best work?
These are not soft questions with little or no meaning. They are practical leadership tools.
Once you understand what is important to someone, you can often find a genuine connection point between their drivers and the organisation’s direction. In most cases, this is far easier than leaders expect.
Motivation Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
A common mistake leaders make is assuming that what motivates them should motivate everyone else.
In reality:
Some people need encouragement and acknowledgement to stay engaged
Others want autonomy and minimal interference
Some are driven by learning and career progression
Others value stability, mastery, or contribution over advancement
None of these are right or wrong. But ignoring them creates friction.
When leaders take the time to understand these differences, they can shape roles, feedback, and expectations in ways that increase ownership rather than resistance.
Alignment Is a Two-Way Responsibility
Leadership is not about bending people to fit a vision at any cost. Nor is it about abandoning direction to keep everyone comfortable.
Alignment is relational and must be intentionally developed and nurtured. It is not a static state you achieve once and then assume will remain intact. Even when someone is fully aligned with you today, that alignment can shift over time, priorities change, pressures increase, contexts evolve, and personal motivations mature.
Alignment, therefore, is not a one-off task or a box to tick. It is an ongoing process of conversation, clarification, recalibration, and shared meaning-making. It requires leaders to stay in dialogue, to sense subtle shifts, and to continuously reconnect individual purpose with collective direction.
More often than not, what looks like disengagement is simply a lack of connection between personal values and organisational intent, between effort and meaning, between task and purpose.