You’re only as young as the last time

      you changed your mind.

      —Timothy Leary

      I like cleaning the kitchen. I don’t love it—it’d be nice if the kitchen would clean itself every once in awhile—but I like it. The more time I spend looking at screens and living in our digital world, the more satisfaction I get from the analog side of life. My daughter, on the other hand, has not yet discovered the joys of household cleaning. In fairness, she’s only eleven.

      Nevertheless, my wife and I are slowly but surely giving her more responsibility around the house. She’s a slippery student though. Her delay tactics are many and wondrous—the “I’m hungry,” the innocent doe eyes, and when all else fails, “Well I have to do my homework first, right?” We started as you’d expect, explaining why doing her chores was important, and the describing values we were trying to instill in her. We issued our share of gentle and not-so-subtle reminders. We tried to raise the stakes with all the typical parenting bribes—a little more or less allowance, a little more or less screen time. But it didn’t catch. No matter what tactics we used to try to cause the problem to go away, it didn’t. We dropped the subject for a while. The stakes weren’t all that high. It’s not that we weren’t frustrated, but she’s a great kid and the process had us all laughing more than anything else. And then it happened.

      It was early evening on a weeknight. I was in my home office wrapping up my day when my wife peeked in. “Follow me,” she said, with a stealthy wave of her hand. We walked quietly down the stairs and turned the corner to get a view into the kitchen. And there she was. Our daughter, moving gracefully around the kitchen, sponge in hand, dish towel on her shoulder … she was cleaning … and humming her favorite song. I may have cried.

      Isn’t it amazing how simple and beautiful it is when someone owns their work? How in an instant, the conflict between the self-interest of “the worker” and the self-interest of “the boss” just disappears? And isn’t it strange how rare an occurrence that is in our world? So, being a pest—and being in the middle of writing a book about authority—I had to know why. But I also knew that my wife, the person who’s taught me the most about what inhabiting authority with grace looks like, was the right person to ask her. Turns out, it all started with cleaning her room.

      Or, better said, with not cleaning her room. And then one day, she was sitting and reading on the comfy chair in the corner of our bedroom (which was clean, thank you very much) and something hit her. “It just feels better in here,” she thought. “My room is so cluttered, so much stuff lying around. It’s hard to find the things I want. In here I just feel more calm.” In the hour before we discovered her in the kitchen, this is what she’d been doing: organizing her room—including what I can assure you is the world’s most ecologically diverse collection of stuffed animals—cleaning off her desk, and stacking her clothes neatly in her closet.

      From a psychological perspective, you might see her behavior as the emergence of self-care, or maybe self-authority, or perhaps self-esteem. But as her parents, it was pure joy. She knew it was what we wanted her to do but she had discovered her own reasons for doing it. And she had discovered the best reason, the one that trumps all others: She did it because she liked the way it made her feel.

      Is there anything more you could want for the people on your team?

      She’s not our employee. But we are the central authority figures in her life. We tried carrots and sticks, the parenting variety, and that didn’t work. What worked was creating the space for her to own it for herself. One of the ingredients in creating that space was not cleaning up her world for her. Have you ever been given a gift like that from someone you worked for—the gift of them not jumping in and saving you, so you had no choice but to figure it out for yourself? The other ingredient was keeping our world clean. Have you ever worked for someone like that, someone who truly embodied their values, and didn’t say one thing and do another when doing the right thing was hard?

      Change was not caused by what we said or how many times we said it. She didn’t start cleaning because we shared a bold vision for cleanliness, or a family-wide goal of a certain number of socks per week in the hamper. It didn’t come from a better explanation of the problem, a clearer process, or checking in with her to see how it was going! The source of change was contrast, her personal experience of a gap: the pain of feeling where she was compared to where she wanted to be.

      Isn’t that outcome what we’re spending billions of dollars, and countless hours, trying to create at work? We go to leadership workshops to figure out how to inspire and create clearer visions. We send our people to management trainings to help them learn to prioritize and get better at positive reinforcement, motivations, and incentives. We drag people to cheesy team-building workshops to create a feeling of common interest. We buy ping-pong tables and catered lunches to try and make it fun. We try our hand at the power of positive thinking, the secret to manifesting success.

      We devour leadership and self-help books. We learn inspiring new ideas. Hope is restored. We create systems, clarify policies, write and rewrite our values statements, try to discover our “Why?” and encourage our people to do the same. But no matter what we try, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how smart or well-educated the leaders of the organization, the problem persists. We still find ourselves flailing around, looking for the magic key that will reach people where they live. We keep asking over and over again, “How can I get people to own their work?” We get no answer.

      That doesn’t mean that nothing happens. Carrot and sticks, including the New Age variety, work to an extent. The dangling of promotions, the promise of raises and bonuses, chair massages, and yoga classes, all can elicit a general sense of compliance, more or less. We still reach goals. We get hard work—which is not the same as great work. But these tactics don’t give you what you really want. What you want is a feeling—the same feeling that every leader who has ever lived craves: “They’ve got this. I can relax.”

      Why don’t any of these tactics get us to that place? It’s because they all have something in common. Can you see it?

      It’s that they all start with the needs of the business, and put the needs of the individuals second, usually a distant second.

      This orientation—this