Culture Hacker

7Strategy, Scores, and PlansThe Real Reason Your People Are Not Engaged

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it's pretty much the whole game today.

Gary Hamel, business consultant¹

If you are going to engage your people and make them responsible for improving your company, then you need to share your objectives and scores, and involve them in the development and execution of plans to achieve those scores.

We have all heard about how important employee engagement is, and as you are reading this book, you are probably thinking that this is what we are really talking about overall. However, let's consider engagement in a more focused way. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “engagement” as “an arrangement to meet or be present at a particular place and time.”² The key for me is “to be present”, meaning we want our employees to be present at or in their work. Over the years, I have thought a lot about the best way to do this with staff members. I have concluded that having them understand the objectives of the organization, ensuring they know how the company is doing against those objectives, and involving them in achieving those objectives will make people feel they are at the heart of the business and that their presence at work does make a difference. Organizational consultant Warren Bennis provided similar insight when he said, “Good leaders ...