This is the third post in my series on meaningful engagement. You can check out the other two posts in the series here:
- Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What's the Difference and Why Should I Care?
- What's the Driving Force Behind Engagement?
Meaningful engagement and the co-creation of change can produce much more commitment than simple buy-in can.
Organizations that settle for buy-in, rather than aspire to meaningful engagement, miss out on the opportunity to:
- Deepen commitment to the change process
- Stimulate co-creation of solutions
- Build business literacy and other important business skills, and
- Accelerate the pace of change.
I define meaningful engagement as:
“Any authentic involvement that allows people to make consequential contributions to the process and the outcome of a change and deepens their understanding of it, their commitment to it, and their ownership of it.”
As I wrote in Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What's the Difference and Why Should I Care?, leader commitment – including the belief that ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions and the willingness to commit time, effort, and resources to enable them to do so – is the pivotal difference between enabling meaningful engagement and settling for buy-in.
Without a leader’s resolute commitment to authentic involvement, the full measure of meaningful engagement will not be realized.
If we know that meaningful engagement is what we want and need in our organizations, how do we go about creating it?
