A wonderful resource for leadership development, culture development and hiring ideas is found in the Sunday New York Times column, “Corner Office.” Every week a president or CEO is interviewed on these topics and provides practical tips and insights.

Click here to visit this week’s article in the New York Times.

This week’s interview is with Marjorie Kaplan, president of Animal Planet and Science networks addressing: “Chaos and Order: How to Achieve the Best Balance.”

The challenge in achieving this balance is that it’s not an exact science. Many leaders want a black and white approach to creating performance, and therefore by extension, motivating people to create that performance. Unfortunately, motivating people more resides in the land of “gray.”

And, so, the key to balancing getting people to take initiative and being creative with a willingness to analyze the goodness of their ideas, is creating an environment that encourages both.

In the end, you want people who can generate creative ideas, and take responsibility for determining the rigor and applicability of those ideas.

And, if people are at one extreme where they offer little fresh thinking, they (as the Kaplan notes) may be in an overly self-censoring culture. Or at the other extreme, there could be a free-for-all of ideas offered without any critical thinking (and lots of people annoyed that their ideas aren’t being put to use by top management!).

The lesson is simple to understand and hard to execute (like so many important things in life): create an environment where people feel free enough to generate the “next idea” and serious enough to determine if it’s “the one.”

You’re a busy professional. Your team has important work to do. You know how you’d like them to perform. And the thought comes into your brain, “How can I make them work the way I want them to work?”

Fact is, you can’t. You can’t make anybody do anything. O.K., if you work in a directive, autocratic, Theory X culture, in the short term you can mandate behavior. But face it, this style of punishing leadership isn’t effective long – people don’t respond well to being treated poorly. I know that isn’t rocket science, but many managers still do it. Why? My experience is this comes from managers acting on their frustration.

And, some managers feel they can lead people to a conclusion. But when you peel back the onion on their technique, this is really some form of manipulation.

So, how do you change people’s work behavior. First, start by assuming your team mates are smart. Second, give them compelling factual reasons to change – giving them a context to understand why approaching the change is more desirable than avoiding it. Third, solicit their reaction to the context and ways they feel the team could move forward (letting them specify the “how” to your “what”). Fourth, lay out a plan to move forward with timelines and touchpoints.

One last point – do leaders ever just state what they want and ask for compliance? Sure they do. Goleman et al. (”Primal Leadership”) discuss this as a “commanding” leadership style. It can’t be your steady diet, but there is a time and place for it. And, it must be done with the utmost of respect.

So, you get people to change by engaging their minds and work with them so they develop their own reasons to change – the most powerful reasons that exist.