Thinking about engagement as shared responsibility, contrasting with leader bottlenecked responsibility, it's interesting that the more people experience a sense of shared responsibility for belonging and impact, the more mindful they are in their work. They are more in sync, proactive, resilient and attentive to detail.
Voice engagement
When we're in idea growing, planning and decision making conversations, the quality of supportable outcomes depends on creating space for reflection and expression by all.
Just making sure conversations are new naturally prevents dominating and disappearing.
The primacy of big picture literacies
Each team in organizations optimally performs and grows when everyone shares big picture marketing, financial, operational and technical literacies. Organizational leaders in these areas make sure knowledge in these areas stays transparent, digestable and accessible by teams. Team leaders help their teams form and pursue their questions about the status on each area.
People only contribute to a big picture to the extent they know it and keep up with it. People can't contribute if they lack real time clarity in the organization's markets, finances, operations and technologies.
Organizations that don't make this a priority maintain slow cultures of micromanaging that keep engagement and growth low. Teams flourish when they have big picture literacies.
Can we entrust teams with decisions?
As real time information and experience based knowledge is more distributed and accessible, teams are in the position to make good decisions quickly and well. If there is a nimble culture of trust within the team, the team can be smarter than any single decision maker.
Entrusting teams is possible when they gain clarity in how to make realistic decisions together. It doesn't take long, and is simply giving them decision recipes and practice.