Engaging People in the Work

I'm engaged!

Engagement is building relationships and putting those relationships to work to accomplish shared goals.

Engagement isn’t just about clicking links or liking something on Facebook. It’s a deepening of relationships that builds partnerships and collaboration as a means of creating economic and societal value.

Companies that know how to deeply engage employees, partners, customers and other key stakeholders in their work have an insurmountable advantage over other firms.

These companies are powered by the greatest force on the planet: the human soul.

 

 

 Featured Articles on Engagement:

Balancing Task and RelationshipBalancing Tasks & Relationships – The Art of Engagement

Engagement is what brings tasks and relationships together. Engagement is the process of building relationships with people and putting those relationships to work to accomplish some goal.

 

“Third-Order” Engagement

First-order engagement is engaging employees. Second-order engagement is engaging customers and partners. Third-order engagement is when customers and partners engage other customers and partners in the organization’s work.

 

Connection and RelationshipConnections are Different than Relationships

A connection, or point of contact, in a relationship is a very ancient tool that biological life of all types uses to stay connected with its surrounding environment in a productive and safe way.

How Connections “Wrap” Our Engagement

You can think of connections as analogous to the packaging that wraps a product you buy at the store. The underlying “product” is the activity, or work, you want to coordinate with someone; the packaging is the connection between you.

Dynamic and not always evenCooperation is Never Perfect

I love it when a scientist comes along and proves something that, on an intuitive level, I just knew had to be true. That’s what just happened for me while watching Martin Nowark talk about his work on cooperation…. Just as I suspected: cooperation isn’t all fluffy white bunnies.

 

Latest Articles on Engagement:

  • When Personal Brands and Corporate Brands Collide Individual people are the connective tissue that connects organizations to their surroundings. So what happens when those people leave an organization, along with the social network connections they built while at the company?
  • An Exercise in Balancing Engagement Many of you know that I write a lot about engagement and think about it as "the process of building relationships with people and putting those relationships to work to accomplish some goal." This exercise is designed to help you better balance this tension between tasks and relationships.
  • Who to Focus On Being effective is part what we focus on and part who we focus on - because so much of what we do in life, we do with other people. To know who to focus on, you need to look at "who matters" and "who you can influence" - and that influence comes through engagement.
  • How to Strengthen Your Organization's Influence Mapping Part 4 of 4: Organizations that are permeable are more open to influence from their external environment. That makes them more resilient and able to align themselves with market forces. Being open to influence is only one aspect of permeability, ho...
  • Cooperation is Never Perfect I love it when a scientist comes along and proves something that, on an intuitive level, I just knew had to be true. That’s what just happened for me while watching Martin Nowark talk about his work on cooperation.... Just as I suspected: cooperation isn’t all fluffy white bunnies.
  • The Deep Science of Cooperation: Martin Nowak If you are interested in cooperative studies or just want to build a more collaborative culture in your place of work, watch the below 20 minute talk by Martin Nowak. It's based on his (and Roger Highfield's) new book: SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evoluti...
  • Wikipedia Now Crowd-Sourcing Article Ratings The Wikipedia community is well aware of the criticisms of its reliability. So that's why I was so interested today to stumble on a relatively new article rating system within Wikipedia. You can see it in action on the Dan Gillmor page, and here's...

 

Enthusiastic guy image by Infusionsoft. Thank you.