What engages people to deliver at work?
What drives or delivers engaged people? Let’s look to ourselves. We choose to become engaged when it suits us. We have no trouble engaging ourselves in our hobbies, families and work when the conditions are encouraging.
Employers need to focus on creating the right conditions. Employers can’t impose engagement: people need to choose to engage themselves.
From our research and consulting work we believe that the essential ingredient of the right conditions is a culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves.
Fostering a culture of distributed leadership means selecting and developing leaders at every level who have the appetite and capability to engage people in the decision-making and change process: inviting employees who deliver the end result to contribute to day-to-day decisions, strategy and change in a well-governed way.
It means sharing power at every level.
A culture of distributed leadership means challenging assumptions about the primacy and effectiveness of a command-and-control approach to leadership. It primarily means individual leaders assessing how they have learnt to make decisions and how they engage others in decision-making and how they transition from being a ‘god’ with all the answers to being a guide helping to liberate the creativity of others.
For employees or associates, it means taking positive steps to get off the fence to volunteer themselves to make things happen. They will do that if they experience the right kind of leadership role model and if they see benefits to themselves like having an influence on decisions which affect them and receiving recognition and reward.
Engagement then is not the same as communication. Communication sets context and the style of communication should reflect the approach to engaging people. Engagement is about liberating people to participate for their own good and to help drive performance and change for the good of their organisation.