Engagement fluency

Every Tuesday evening, I practise my French with Jean Claude. We used to talk in person when he lived in Melbourne. Now it’s over video calls on our phones. After breakfast for him in Montpelier and just before dinner for me.

Our weekly conversations maintain my fluency. If I miss a week, my fluency suffers. If I miss two in a row – like I did in last month – I reckon I go backwards. The next conversation feels a bit stilted. I forget words and lose my ease of expression.

We know we have to practise something regularly to get better at it. In life and in work.

Twice in the last month I’ve been asked to help an organisation bridge the gap between them and their annoyed and even angry stakeholders.

One caller was incredulous.

‘They are overreacting. We told them what we were going to do. They shouldn’t have been surprised.’

I was surprised to hear that ‘engagement’ for this caller meant irregular emails and annual meetings.

If we are getting completely different responses from stakeholders than we expected, it’s time to take a fresh look at how we are engaging with them.

A good place to start is how regularly we engage.

Practising engagement does not make it perfect but it maintains ease, builds trust and engagement ‘fluency’ to a level that we know we can talk to our stakeholders when the news is not good or what they want to hear.

A client recently remarked that engagement is circular, not linear. We have to return to the same topic regularly. We have to build new relationships all the time.

If you practise enough, you may achieve mastery in a skill. We might become ‘engagement masters’ but we’ll never master a stakeholder or a community. People can’t be ‘mastered’ or ‘managed’. But we can all engage better. No excuses.

Unlike my French conversation, it may not take weekly practise, but it does need to be regular.

What's On

Masterclass: Design workshops that deliver

20 July - 10 August 2021

Each session will run on a Tuesday from 12 - 1:15pm

Hey, if you can’t plan a workshop for a group, how can you engage a whole community?

Details and to book