'I hate this company and my boss is an idiot." You wouldn't think so to hear her talk, but Carole is completely engaged by her work. Is she happy in her job? No. Will she look for another job in the near future? Quite possibly. But right now she's doing some of the best work of her life.
Engagement can mean many things: intense curiosity and interest, obsessive focus on results, extreme perfectionism, a willingness to "go the limit." But at its core it has two key elements. First, it involves being in the moment and highly focused. Second, it's intensely personal, involving the expression of individual talents and a heightened feeling of self-efficacy -- mastery over your work and your environment.
You may do your work in concert with others, but engagement always involves self-expression. That's why you rarely find intense feelings of engagement in environments where all work is team-directed, and team results take precedence over individual contributions.
For people to become engaged, there must be some challenge or risk -- even danger -- involved, and therefore anxiety as to the outcome. And once the challenge is resolved, engagement diminishes.
That's why when people complete a major project -- whether it's carrying out a merger or finishing a book -- they often feel flat and detached.
Easy, everyday work on the other hand can be pleasant, but it doesn't engage.
Obsessive focus, perfectionism, going the limit -- these are all desirable qualities when it comes to productivity. One can understand why engagement has become such a hot subject, with conferences devoted to it and some companies changing the title of their human resources departments to talent engagement departments. And yet engagement has often proved to be an elusive commodity.
We often assume that engagement and work satisfaction are the same thing, and that by ensuring people are satisfied with their work, we can also ensure they will be engaged by it. But as Carole's story demonstrates, they may have little to do with each other.
You can be very satisfied with your work -- enjoying the work environment or your colleagues or the convenient commute -- without being intensely committed to what you do. By the same token, you can be dissatisfied but still engaged. If you hate your boss and are determined to prove him wrong, for example, you may actually be energized to perform at a higher level. I've done some of my best work under conditions where I was most annoyed by a rigid, controlling client.
This is not to suggest that work satisfaction is unimportant. People who are dissatisfied with their jobs are unlikely to stay around very long, no matter how engaged they may be. Organizations concerned with retaining their most productive workers need to pay close attention to their satisfaction as well as their engagement.
If satisfaction alone is not enough to ensure productivity, how can you stimulate engagement? At the minimum, people need to care about the task at hand. Managers can try to make the work more important and valued by explaining its context and showing appreciation for results. Still, if the characteristics of the particular task, or the work environment, or the culture don't speak directly to the individual's own psychological needs, no amount of sweet talk or work shaping will make the job become engaging.
Jason, for example, a human resources manager in the hospitality industry, took a director level job with a manufacturing company. He expected the work to be stimulating and challenging. But he found his new work environment "brutal . . . I just couldn't relate to the people, or care whether we got 100 more widgets out the door." Not only was Jason unhappy, he was completely disengaged. Finding yourself in work that doesn't match your interests or values is a very common cause of career distress -- and there's usually no fix for it other than quitting.
Organizations should avoid the hubris of thinking they can provide engaging work for all their members. But they can significantly increase the level of staff engagement by improving the match between the individual and the work. Mainly, this is a matter of putting the right people in the right place, because there is very little to be done when the fundamentals -- the company, the product, the service or whatever else -- fail to match up to the individual's motivations and strengths. By providing career planning programs, organizations foster in their staff a heightened self-awareness of needs, values and skills so that they can shape their work in a way more in tune with personal needs, and better express those needs to their managers.
"What do I need to do to engage your heart and mind?" This is a question that one vice-president of human resources asks her appreciative direct reports every quarter. Managers need to sit down with their people and ask them what they need.
Providing staff with the resources and training they need to achieve mastery over their work is also key to fostering engagement. People must know that they have the skills, the time and the support they need to be successful. Unfortunately, today many managers and professionals receive little support, which accounts in large part for the widespread low grade malaise I see everywhere.
Individuals, too, need to work to avoid disengagement. Take an activist approach to your career. Ask yourself regularly if you are still challenged, still learning something new, still doing work that speaks to your most important motivations and values. Are you taking risks? Do you occasionally feel scared?
It's possible, of course, to become too engaged. When individuals become too passionate about their work, they can lose perspective. They become rigid in defending their beliefs, overly perfectionist, blind to any hint that things are not on track and unwilling to accept criticism or direction.
Managers often complain about individual contributors who are unwilling to compromise their professional standards in order to satisfy business needs. These specialists are not prepared to live with less than perfect, where their managers seek that which is doable and implementable.
When engagement tips over into fanaticism, the consequences can be highly damaging.
Jill, for example, ignored a year's worth of consistent negative information that her struggling new business was not going to make it because she was significantly undercapitalized. The more opposition she got, the more persistent she became. By the time she was forced into bankruptcy two years down the road, she had ruined her marriage, lost most of her friends, run through all her savings and suffered huge damage to her self-esteem.
Often people who have "crossed the line" into unethical or illegal behaviour try to explain what they have done in terms of commitment to a belief or cause.
Realistically, you can't expect to be engaged all the time. There are always going to be peaks and valleys.
Some people worry about their career when they are not 100-per-cent engaged -- when every day doesn't represent a supernova of excitement and anticipation. They feel like they are turning into The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
Popular culture and literature is full of pathetic images of people who have settled for a comfortable but ultimately small and unfulfilling life, like the Jack Nicholson character in the recent move About Schmidt.
But even great work has its irritants and its dry spells. You can't have great work all the time. As farmers once left their fields fallow to prepare them for future crops, people need time out between peaks of engagement to consolidate, regroup and reflect on the next stage, or simply to avoid burnout. Now and again you just have to chill. Barbara Moses, PhD, is an organizational career management consultant, speaker and author. Her next book, What Next: The Complete Guide to Taking Control of Your Working Life, will be published this spring.