One of the biggest talents needed today is the ability to engage meaningfully, intensely and consistently with business stakeholders. As I keep reinstating in most of my columns, if change was the only constant say even 5 years ago, it has become the air we breathe today. In this uncertainty and volatility, business partners continuously are on the lookout for the best version to ensure the sustainability of their business. Our high engagement mindset can keep us in their centre stage with consistent positive moments of truth and value addition. We then become one of the preferred dependable strong pillars in their ecosystem.
Needless to say, the high engagement mindset also helps you firm up your personal relationships that matter to you. Often the biggest damage of not adhering to a work life balance leads to low and surface engagement with your loved and treasured ones. Gradually you loose connect and relevance with them. Friends dwindle away, you are just a father figure to your children and you are slowly in an environment of isolation and drift in your personal space. This leads to unhappiness; health issues and gradually affects your productivity at work as a cause and result of your life cycle.
Its not hard to achieve a high engagement mindset. But the first step is to decide to evolve into this mindset. The second step is a cycle once more. Try, retry and try again!
Demystifying high engagement mindset
I guess we all know what engagement is, but here we are looking at meaningful and impactful engagement. Humans like to engage with another human being because of gainful engagement. In other words any engagement is based on mutual interest and benefit. Even with friends the engagement happens because we like to spend time with them, we have similar interests and hobbies or even play tennis together. In business similarly gainful engagement happens because you work well together bound with one magical term ‘targeted business goals and making money’. Let’s take another social example of being part of an NGO. Here, gainful engagement is driven by what you add in terms of collective progress. Now, if you heighten your meaningful and impactful engagement in any of the above stated situations, what’s the most significant immediate result? Your value goes up and you become a wanted person or a professional.
Simple steps to intensify your engagement mindset
Intensifying your engagement mindset may sound as simple as changing your automobile gear to a four wheel drive mode. However, you need to ensure that you are capable and enabled to change gear. The first step is to prepare your mindset evolution map. Select those key people in your life with whom you want or need to intensify your mindset with. They could be in two broad categories, personal and professional. The personal category would include your girlfriend/ wife, parents, relatives, friends etc. The professional category would include your boss, mentor, team members, clients etc. Once you have listed them down, initially just pick 5 per category. Analyse gaps in your relationships with them. What’s missing? What needs to be added? From these gaps too, just pick 5 most important value adds per person. Do you realise that there will be 5 value adds you will need to do for 10 chosen people? This means 50 value adds.
Monitor your mindset change and impact
Just try one experiment. Change your cupboard shelves. As simple as that. You will find that you will still look for your things where they were stored for a long time. We are creatures of habit. Therefore unleash your value adds in your high engagement mindset with caution. Watch out for reactions from the 10 key people you have carefully selected. Ensure that your change in mindset does not misfire or worse still backfire. It’s like a plane taking off, gradually but consistently. And when you reach your desired altitude, keep it steady with consistency. Dependability comes from continuous positive moments of truth. And dependability builds the most important pinnacle, trust!
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves.” ― Steve Jobs
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