I have recently made a point of reading every “employee engagement” article that has come down the block, and the disturbing thing about most of them is that they tend to approach the “engagement” issue as though it is simply a “problem” on the employee side. We are not “empowering” employees, we are not hiring well, we are not “building leaders.”

While all of this may be true, I believe these answers tend to be too narrowly focused. The real answer is more holistic than this. What if we were to focus not on the individual employees, but on the organization itself? What if our aim was to build an organization where people not only wanted to work, but were lining up to work there?

One approach tends to be bottom up, while the other seems to be top-down. The first approach is “what can we do to change this (or stop this),” while the second approach focuses on “what must we do to be the industry leader? The first is reactive, the second is proactive!

How can we fix this, versus who do we want to be?

Oops! Maybe that’s the first hurdle. Maybe we haven’t clearly identified “who we want to be.”