Employee Engagement and the Failure of Leadership

Employee engagement is the single most serious issue in management today. Its apparently inexorable decline will spell the end of Western economies. If you cannot compete on price (and the West cannot) you must compete on creativity and quality. Without employee engagement, neither of these is possible. Such engagement is not the result of some initiative quite detached from leadership and the lack of engagement today is nothing less than a failure of leadership. Most employees in most organisations seek to do their best, often in spite of management processes which disengage people, add useless cost and serve only as grist to the cynics’ mill. If employees are to feel engaged with a company, they need to feel proud of it. Only a company that takes a positive view of ethics can expect employees to find compelling purpose in their work.