Introduction

The life of a leader can be hectic. On most days, we have a dizzying array of problems screaming for our attention—internal pressures such as staffing, quality, and capacity issues combined with external storm clouds propelling the war for talent, competitive pressures, and ever-changing governmental regulations, to name just a few.

In the midst of this cacophony is brewing a threat to our organizations, often unseen and unheard above the daily din—the thief of sales, profits, customer satisfaction, and the pride in a job well done: low employee engagement.

The data on this topic is so consistently shocking, most leaders have become numb to the annual statistics. Some have even retreated into denial and chosen to stop thinking and talking about engagement. This is not the answer.

Engagement matters for several reasons.

First, there are the people. Their work life matters. As leaders, we have an opportunity to help people find meaning and purpose in their work. We can create a place where they can bring their best selves to work every day. The workplace we create determines, to a large extent, how engaged someone is at work. Do your people go home energized or disempowered at the end of a long day? We really do have the responsibility to decide.

Leaders should also care deeply about engagement because of the opportunity it presents. If we can harness the untapped potential buried deep within the hearts of our people, we can turn engagement from a liability into a real, sustainable competitive advantage and usher in gains in productivity unseen since the industrial revolution!

Finally, for many organizations, engagement is the final hurdle to becoming a high performance organization. I outlined this journey in my book Chess Not Checkers and have done a deep dive on some of the best practices in other recent books. For those who are not familiar with the concepts, here is a ten-second summary:

All high performance organizations have four things in common. They Bet on Leadership (Leaders Made Here), Act as One (Talent Magnet), and Win the Heart (covered in this book). These three “moves” enable them to Excel at Execution (to be covered in a book to be released in the spring of 2020).

Here’s my encouragement to you: keep an open mind, check your assumptions about engagement at the door, and get ready to unleash the full potential of your people and your organization.