Employee engagement is the Holy Grail because when it improves so does the customer experience, productivity and revenue. Also when it moves up, costs, absenteeism, turnover, theft, accidents, and defects go down. In the search to drive up employee engagement there have been many alluring paths to explore.

Over the years most organizations have jumped at dozens of programs to boost the degree to which people, their most valuable asset, take initiative and go the extra mile to make improvements. Unfortunately, tools such as lean, Six Sigma and even team-building do NOT transform employee engagement. Repeating a good practice, no matter how much we hope it does, can’t transform an organization. As Einstein put it, <em>“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”</em>