In Pursuit of Excellence

Roadmap: Engagement in the Education and Business Worlds

I’ve seen a recent spike in viewers on the topic of “engagement” and thought it might help you find what you’re looking for if you had a roadmap of recent posts on engagement here at In Pursuit of Excellence. The following posts explore engagement in both the academic and business / industry worlds, as they are very much related.

The Business Case for Alignment and Engagement  is a lengthier piece that details a good amount of data and estimates for how engagement impacts execution and productivity. 

What IS Engagement Anyway?  One of the focal points for In Pursuit of Excellence is “engagement”.  So…what IS it anyway? In exploring the blogosphere, I came away even more confused than when I went in. There is huge disparity of experience-based opinion among practitioners. Add all the academic debates, studies and dissertations on “engagement”….forget about it! I made a stab at concocting a working definition for engagement in this three-post series:

1. Engagement Per Commercial Authorities: three heavy hitters weigh in on engagement: Towers-Perrin, Gallup Management, and BlessingWhite.
2. Engagement: the Gap Between Academics and Shop Floor. Framing, for my own clarification, some of the academic language surrounding engagement…. Studies, dissertations and meta-analyses of the previously established constructs of satisfaction, commitment, involvement and motivation… Operations managers need plain talk, centered around results. They don’t live in the world of studies, constructs and dissertations. The quickest route to a manager’s stonewall is to espouse theory without substance.
3. Engagement: Now We’re Getting Personal!  The challenge: come up with a working definition for engagement. Not easy, but I’m going to give it a shot based on four attributes I hold as truths. OK, not “universal truths” but my opinion. This first installment looks at engagement levels I experienced in my musical endeavors.
4. Getting Personal TWO: Engagement On-the-Job. Here I track a portion of my career path against those same truths, in more universal business terms. My hope is that this personal analysis will help develop an operational definition of engagement, for my own sanity if nothing else.
5. Engagement On-the-Job, Two  is a continuation of #4. PHASE TWO: making the turn to high engagement gets complicated as there can be different outcomes after the initial newness wears off. To engage, or not to engage….that is the question.  The impact of leadership style on engagement is significant.
6. PHASE THREE: the Home Stretch.  A substantial challenge is emerging…how do you keep highly engaged individuals in the zone of high satisfaction, maximum contribution? Coming soon…what’s all the buzz about strengths-based leadership? Why not the good old “acceptable level of competency”?

Let the Rabbits Run  is a great parable from the book Soar With Your Strengths by Clifton and Nelson. This book is a classic in the strengths-based leadership field pioneered by Gallup Management. The more a person has the opportunity to utilize their strengths, the more they are fully engaged.

Engagement Goes to School. The hypothesis: high school kids are disengaged in both their education and in thinking about their future….education is perceived to be irrelevant to their future. The underlying issue: students are not engaged in any kind of “future thinking” to even know what is, and isn’t relevant to them. An even deeper issue…teachers, and parents too, are also disengaged.

The High Cost of Student Disengagement?   The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, a McKinsey report, predicts that the U.S. GDP would be $1.3-2.3 trillion higher if the achievement gap between the United States and its international peers were closed in 1998.

Meaningful School-to-Career There is a good deal more to be said about this topic, a definite work-in-process. If students saw the connection between what they were doing in school and the rest of their lives, they would become more engaged. In the meantime, the rest of the developed / developing world is kicking US students’ butts in standard achievement scores.

School-to-career requires a real partnership between education and B & I. (pssst…..this is not just an education crisis-this has everything to do with competitiveness in the global economy)

And after all this, I still don’t have a working definition of engagement in twenty words or less…