Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

Yes, engaged employees probably deliver higher-quality performance, but too often engagement is treated as the endgame, rather than serving customers and getting results. And the standard beliefs about how and why people are engaged in their work miss the true drivers of work passion.

When engineers start to whine about a process you’re trying to implement, you want to really dig into what’s bothering them, because they hate senseless bureaucracy and stupid process. But they don’t mind discipline at all.

I’m a big fan of goals. Couldn’t be a bigger fan. It’s the usual management approach to achieving them that is so wrong. Typically, the time frames we set and the complexity of the structure created for leading teams and monitoring results make achieving goals harder than it needs to be.

“Engagement” is a term that, when used in business, I dislike about as just about as much as “empowerment.”