Engagement as a Sign of Resilience

Despite all the snow we’ve had here in the past week, it is spring in Minnesota, and growth is emerging. My daffodils have already grown from half an inch to 4 inches in just a few days. The trees are starting to bud and soon show a green tinge as their leaves unfurl. (None of this required my direct supervision, I might add!

With all these signs of spring, it’s not surprising I woke up thinking about hummingbirds this morning. Did you know hummingbirds have outstanding spatial memory and can remember feeder locations years later? They can also keep track of bloom peaks and remember which flowers they’ve visited. A hummingbird’s brain is designed for learning and spatial memory. This is an example of how nature is created for engagement. And don’t you wish some of your employees had the same predisposition to learning and spatial memory as the hummingbird?

Everything in nature is designed to be self-organizing, and this capacity to direct its own life and relationship with an ecosystem requires active engagement by all species. There is no apathy in nature. If a species is not engaged, it is dying. Nature exemplifies that resilient systems are filled with engagement. Resilience is defined by a system’s ability to absorb disruption and maintain function. Engagement by all species and plant life within an ecosystem allows for minute adaptation and large-scale adaptation by individual species and the ecosystem. The minute adaptations require species and plant life to be aware of what is occurring around them and adapt to thrive in the future.

The paradox of engagement in nature vs. engagement in organizations

However, organizations need help creating cultures of engagement at all levels of the organization. This raises a question.

“What is the source (or sources) in an organization that creates less engagement when Nature has engagement in abundance?”  

For example, leadership can influence engagement if distributed across the organization. Our organizational culture can influence engagement if it models, recognizes, and rewards authentic engagement. Our engagement invitations can influence people’s responses only if staff believe the invitation is authentic. When the invitations are just a form of “organizational theater,” people know the engagement invitations are inauthentic and often only just for show.

All of these strategies can influence engagement, but the big problem is the “owner mindset” businesses have. When employees see their leaders as “owners of the organization” due to compensation distribution, economic, or self-interested behaviors, they also believe that the leaders “own” the problems in the organization. Why should they actively help solve problems that are the owners? When people don’t see themselves as having a stake in the problem that the CEO wants them to solve, they will withhold their engagement because it’s not perceived as their problem! We saw an example of this in the leaked video this past week of MillerKnoll CEO Andi Owen encouraging her employees to forget about their lost bonuses, go after the millions needed to maintain their bottom line, and leave “Pity City,” This is after keeping her own bonus of $4 million.

Engagement increases when benefits and burdens are widely shared

Resilience and the active engagement of a system are deeply connected. If we want to design our organizations to strengthen the engagement in our organizations, we might want to ask:

• Is this a place where benefits and burdens are widely shared? (This is an antidote to the leaders own this problem – not me mindset)
• Is there a level of trust and transparency that is embedded in the organization’s culture?
• Are the invitations to engage authentic or just for show?
• How do our current structures and processes help or hinder genuine engagement?

If we want to become resilient today, organizations must find ways to create conditions conducive to engagement. I’m not saying we all need to be just like hummingbirds, but that kind of engagement is definitely aspirational!