Over at Talking IC, back in June, Lee Smith commented on Sue Dewhurst's post about engagement.
Sue says:
OK, I admit it, I hate the 'e' word. It's joined 'strategic' and 'culture' as one of those wibbly terms that gets bandied about constantly whilst half the time people don't really know what it means... but they manage to have an earnest-sounding conversation about it anyway.
Lee agrees that engagement is most often used as a buzzword and too often people mean different things by it anyway. I suspect we'd all say the same about "culture" too, but as he recommends a new book (CEO - the Chief Engagement Officer by John Smythe) that is a useful application of the "engagement" concept he also highlights an important facet of what "culture" is:
If you, like me, are getting irritated by the 'e' word, then I recommend John's book as an antidote. It'll convince you that engagement - as a management philosophy - is a no-brainer and that many of our current approaches to internal communication remain essentially about coercion, command and control.
Culture is, in part, those assumptions that are so deep rooted we do not usually notice them. And possible the part of "internal communication" culture I most want to help change is the cancer of "coercion, command and control."
Why do I want to change it? Not just because I don't believe that the centre of the organisation "always knows best" but because the evidence is that internal communication that relies on coercion, command and control just doesn't work.
It is worth saying that it's a few steps of logic from that statement to the philosophy I'm building Enoptron around, but I'll talk about that more in my next post.
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