Command-and-control leadership (with all it entails) is at its heart demotivating. The message is ‘shut up and do what you’re told!’ Well that’s what people do.

I agree with Tobias, working with truly motivated and engaged colleagues is a wonderful thing, and you can do great things together. But to get this state, you have to create the conditions where motivation can happen. And as you point out, this is not about happiness workshops.

Scrum teams have often been successful at achieving this state, and Steve Denning, with his Radical Management, has sought to identify those patterns where sustainable motivation can happen and to establish the link between genuine motivation and corporate success.

Yep. I hear you. Most big companies build facades of collaboration and “team work” It’s usually BS. Still, I believe engagement is something to seek. Happiness, probably not.

As you can see I put “employee engagement” in quotation marks. What I wanted to point out here is that most large organizations “promote” employee engagement yet in reality they “force” employees to conform to a specific behaviour. Having worked on several big projects I’ve seen that this is the norm in corporate America/Canada.

Employee engagement has to be “positive” and conform to a predetermined accepted behaviour.

How many employees do you know that are allowed to challenge their superiors’ wishes or be confrontational if they truly believe that things are not going well?

Remember, I’m talking about large organizations here, not small companies where employee engagement means a different thing altogether.

But engagement, now that’s real. A person enjoying what they do, being in the flow of work, not needing to clock-watch. How can that be bad? Truly engaged employees have opinions—they have a voice and they are not afraid to use it. When I see engagement I see creativity, confrontation, challenge. I don’t see groupthink.