There is a difference between being a boss and being a leader. There are some really good resources online if you google “Leadership.”
One of the key things I did with my team (after taking numerous leadership courses to try and wrap my brain around the magnitude of the topic and to determine my own leadership style), was to give them a list of about 40 “values” words. This included words like honesty, integrity, freedom, family etc. (you can probably find the list online). The exercise is to have each person sort the list of 40 down to 20 acknowledging that all of the words are important but you want them to keep the ones that are MOST important to them. Keep doing the exercise until each person has three words on their list. As it works for most teams, the three words describe the CORE values that are important to each person.
I know the three core values of each of my team members and they know mine. We now have a vocabulary to talk about things when we disagree. For example, [this is made up] one of my staff with a core value of Freedom may respond differently than another employee when she wants to leave early for the day and I say “No.” Because she knows that one of my core values is Justice, she is okay if I say, “you can leave early tomorrow, but Bob is leaving early today and I need you to cover.”
In conversations, we actually acknowledge which of our values is driving our opinions and it makes it MUCH easier to talk about things. There is an unspoken element here as well: If I do activities like this with my team members, they know I am trying to get to know them better as it relates to work and that I value what each of them bring to the table. That alone can go a great distance toward building a team.
I need to add that I work in a Union environment where I can’t just fire someone that isn’t working toward the betterment of the team. This teaches the leader to work with what they have and to try and bring out the best in people.