Engagement and the Locus of Control.

Customer engagement and employee engagement have become industries in their own right. They have spawned consultancies, reports, surveys and methodologies.

I’d hate to spoil that, but I’m going to suggest that at the heart of engagement is a really simple construct, one we can do something about, but which may prove a challenge for many.

It’s about the “locus of control”. It’s the extent to which people believe they have power over events in their lives. A person with an internal locus of control believes that he or she can influence events and their outcomes, while someone with an external locus of control blames outside forces for everything.

Many of the things we do as organizations to achieve efficiency encourages those to whom they are applied an external locus of control. Levels of authority, permissions, fixed processes. In a previous blog I mentioned the five neural domains of engagement (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness) and when you think about it, many sys…