Engagement is the art of gaining effort from workers that you cannot demand.
If you're like most leaders, there's a metric that you never measure. It's the gap between the least that a person can do without getting in trouble and the most that they are actually cable of giving.
Economists call that gap "discretionary effort" — the extra hour that you did not ask for, the creative fix outside someone's job description, the phone call to a customer that goes beyond the script because the worker genuinely cares.
The hard truth is, you can command the least. You cannot command the most. Discretionary effort is given voluntarily, or it isn't given at all.
In this episode of Upsize Your Leadership, Dr. Mike Armour unpacks effective engagement. He shows that leaders who are disengaged with their workers never create a workforce engaged with the organization.
Engagement, he explains, is congruence between an individual and the work that he or she has been asked to do. Engagement runs on two engines: motivation (connecting the leader's vision to what the follower values) and inspiration (energizing that motive with emotion). His formula is simple — Activated Motive + Energizing Emotion = Durable Motion.
Along the way, he draws a sharp line between incentives (which management can extend or withdraw) and motives (which reside within the individual worker independent of management prerogatives).
This episode is the fifth in a six-part series on Five Essentials of Leadership. A PDF transcript of the program may be downloaded at https://www.upsizeyourleadership.com/episodes/2607-engagement.htm.
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