The myth of engagement

‘When you lose ‘em, you’ve lost ‘em for good!’ said the shouty presenter at the leadership conference.

And that’s not true.

It almost sounds like a threat that you need to keep people hooked in or you’ll lose them.

But we all lose focus and attention, all the time. As leaders, speakers, trainers or facilitators, we can’t hold people’s engagement all of the time.

So yes, we will ‘lose them.’ We all drift away. But it doesn’t mean they are forever ‘lost’.

Attention ebbs and flows. We can’t give 100% attention, 100% of the time.

The task becomes then: how do you get them back? And when they come back, how do you catch them up (not catch them out) with what has been happening - whether they’re ‘gone’ for 15 seconds or 15 minutes?

The work then is to firstly DESIGN for engagement.

And then to invite, welcome and DELIVER for reengagement. And repeated reengagement, precisely because our attention lapses.

Rather than the control freak in us expecting or demanding 100% attention from a team or group (and performing games, tricks and ra-ra entertainment for fear of losing it), work to earn engagement and to hold it, understanding that it will leave at times.

And then work to always encourage, and warmly and kindly welcome re-engagement, whenever it comes. 

“We want this session to be interactive”

Yes. We do too! 

There’s only so much listening or just watching of slides we can handle. Meeting after meeting or an all-talk workshop can become a bit much ... after a full day of it, a week of it or six months of it!!

So, plan ahead for interaction. 

🌟Ask a question and for the response to be in the chat box or to share an emoji

🌟Ask a question via a poll and see the results 

🌟Share a story and ask for stories

🌟Use the Spotlight feature (in Zoom) to feature a few people at a time in panel style, group share or a fishbowl conversation 

🌟Hear several people’s stories and weave them together, finding common themes or threads 


If you’d like the session to be interactive, you can be sure the team, guests and participants will probably want it to be interactive too. 

🌟Allow the time. 
🌟Vary the activities. 
🌟Encourage ... and then let the interaction happen. 

Loosen the grip on controlling all of the information. There’s some magic waiting there to be made. 

How do you plan to include people

It sucks to be forgotten, ignored, excluded or left out. So in a team or group meeting, how are you planning to include people? 

In meetings and workshops we may have presentations scheduled, information to share and decisions to be made. 

But how will you involve and include people in the session? 

Inclusion happens better when it’s by design. 

We know that people get excluded, overlooked and forgotten if we leave it to chance, or our bias and ego. 

Take that meeting agenda you’ve got and work out when and how you’ll deliberately include and involve people. 

Where can you :
- Ask people their thoughts and opinions
- Encourage them to share stories
- Invite comments, answers and suggestions
- Welcome questions, queries and insights 
...and more. 

Too many meetings have the ‘any other questions?’ footnote at the end as a way of involving people. 

But by then, it’s kind of too late. 

Start sooner. Right off the bat!

Create opportunities for involvement, participation, contribution and inclusion. 

It makes for stronger engagement ... as well as better outcomes. 

Design for relevance

When we bring people together to collaborate, co-design and solve problems, we must consider how to help them do their best work.

We’re so bad at meetings - and boring ones - that our bad meeting culture gets transferred and stretched into longer sessions like workshops. 

We don’t just have boring meetings for an hour; we end up having boring workshops for 3-hours! 

So many of the leaders I train in better facilitation skills want to know about fun games for their workshops. They soon realize the best activities are those that actually help us do the work we are there to do. 

Careful you don’t waste time, energy and participant engagement on games that might be high on fun, but end up being low on relevance and results. 

It is possible to design agendas and activities for workshops that are interesting, engaging, creative ... and help get the work done too!

Don’t be distracted by the pursuit of cute; you could completely miss out on designing for relevance and results. 

That workshop will need some design

Many of us are leading more workshops and meetings than ever before.

We’re bringing people together, helping them with learning, planning, collaborating, discussing and decision making.

So how do you ensure the workshops you lead are interesting, engaging ... AND effective?

By design.

Successful workshops and meetings come via better design.

And whether we’re leading online or face-to-face sessions, they all require some design ... before the day.

Careful though, because we can also go overboard and over-engineer! There’s a sweet spot where we have designed the most valuable elements and then we can let the rest roll.

Focus on these 4 things in design :

1. Engagement
2. Activities
3. Participation
4. Outcomes.