Hardwiring Productive Employee Engagement
Five top leadership disciplines
“Culture is simply a shared way
of doing something with passion.”
—Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO, Airbnb1
Chapter at a glance: Top leaders face a unique challenge: learning to both run and improve their business simultaneously. This chapter details five essential leadership team disciplines that establish dynamic engagement throughout organizations—practices that harness collective intelligence and foster sustainable innovation.
“CULTURE EATS STRATEGY for breakfast.” This often-repeated truism speaks to the power of organizational culture to drive or destroy strategic plans. Yet most leaders underestimate its impact on change initiatives. Once the latest transformation plan is launched, top leaders typically return to running the business, delegating improvement to others. This division creates a fatal flaw: it signals to employees that change is separate from daily operations rather than integral to how the organization works.
A story from John Humphrey, founder of the Forum Corporation and mentor in my early career, captures this truth. One spring day, as a farmer plowed his fields, a young agricultural extension agent approached.
Agent: Hello there. I see you’re preparing for spring planting.
Farmer: That’s right. Been doing it for thirty years.
Agent: Did you know about our programs that have boosted your neighbors’ crop yields by up to forty percent?
Farmer: Interesting, but to be honest, I’m only farming at half my potential right now.
John’s insight was poignant: many leadership teams, especially at the top, operate below their potential but won’t acknowledge it. More importantly, they haven’t learned how to simultaneously run their business while improving it. For them, it’s one or the other. They embrace the latest innovations and trends for driving change while neglecting their own behaviors and practices that have the biggest impact on success.
Just as frontline teams learn the Ideas-to-Action Process one step at a time, top leaders must master new disciplines that integrate running and improving the business. Our experience shows this requires both the right mindset and specific tools tailored to the senior level. Success hinges on practicing five leadership team
disciplines, illustrated below, that work together as an integrated system to create sustainable change and continuous innovation—balancing performance goals with employee engagement.
Want to build a culture where innovation and continuous improvement are baked in?
Read Ideas to Action to find out how.
