What if companies engaged their people, replacing fear of losing control with a focus on health, well-being and high value contribution? According to Perplexity.ai, it would add $9.6 trillion to the global economy. Worse, 27% of managers are disengaged. So why isn’t making an engagement a priority happening?
I gained insight when a colleague who consults within US companies mentioned that, post-COVID, he was hearing executives say they could hardly wait for this engagement fad to be over. Hopefully, that’s not a popular view, but if it is, then fear of losing control over others, rooted in emotional insecurity, lies at the source of failure to adapt thinking.
Could replacing emotional insecurity with emotional mastery be the highest leverage step toward well-being and resilience?
Dan Szuc and Jo Wong run a UX consultancy out of Hong Kong. Aware of space, place and interaction, and grounded in theatre production and education, they observed how interactions are driven by culture. Make Meaningful Work has templates for observing micro action in place. Their cultural work involves paying attention to what is going around, widening the lens, opening the aperture to capture the bigger picture. How about treating culture as a theatre production?
The live stream is on my YouTube podcast channel. This is a 5 minute overview of the discussion.
I have questions.
How can workplace cultures be moved from process-driven to being aligned in personal and organizational values, when decision-makers fear loss of control?
How can there be movement toward high engagement and company resilience when there is habitual avoidance of discomfort?
What if asking and having challenging conversations deepened skillsets, engaged creative thinking, and connected decisions to consequence, meaning and purpose?
In 2024, the Edelman Trust Barometer reported an innovation crisis. Innovation reverted to tweaking what existed, skipping the opportunity to rethink and delete processes that worked against company viability. That’s not innovation. More like retrenching to the familiar and bypassing the value of uncertainty for leadership and growth.
If there is a simple way to illuminate possibilities, it would be to observe where the focus is going and make an intentional decision to take action and move forward. At the end of our longer discussion, Jo Wong closed with: “ You have power. Just be more aware of it and be more intentional about how you frame things. The mindset and attitude can affect your choices.”
Find Jo and Dan’s book on Amazon, and their work on the links below.
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https://www.makemeaningfulwork.com/
https://www.apogeehk.com/
https://www.makemeaningfulwork.com/books
https://www.amazon.com/dp/173792823X?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520
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