The starting point for the journey to change your culture takes real courage and is an application of courage that doesn’t get nearly enough airplay. You see, the easy leadership road that leads to mediocrity is to hire people that look and talk like you and ensure that you remain the smartest person in the room.

The more difficult, but more rewarding path is to find the courage to hire people who have the potential to surpass you, who think differently than you do, and who are willing and able to challenge you.

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.

A balancing act all leaders must grapple with is the short-term benefit of moving fast with minimal drag from a personally curated “Team Yes,” versus the long-term satisfaction that comes from building a diverse team that will simultaneously challenge, support, and push the boundaries of your current state positions and thinking.

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.

A steward is aware of the balancing acts that surround them, is adept at navigating the treacherous waters of extreme viewpoints, and acts with the interests of myriad constituencies in mind.