Engagement Questions

When coaching for engagement, it's important to have a clear definition and not assume everyone understands it the same way. You can ask questions like, "What will you do to positively engage?" and "What are some areas where you need to improve engagement?" It's important to remember that engagement can have different interpretations and people may have personal reasons for lacking engagement. When coaching, you can focus on specific attributes like attentive listening and avoiding distractions. Ask individuals to rate themselves and discuss how they can improve. Asking these questions before, during, and after meetings can foster engagement. Avoid distractions like looking at phones, as it can signal a lack of engagement and cause negative perceptions. Keep coaching sessions shorter and use questions to encourage reflection on engagement. When using questions with engagement, and let's assume you do have a strong definition, you can also ask somebody simply, what are you gonna do to positively engage? What are you gonna do to represent our definition of engagement? What are some things you do well with engagement? What are some opportunities where you need to raise your engagement? Again, I like to use a definition. Don't assume everyone has the same interpretation of what engagement is. Most people are not gonna knock on your door and say, boss, I gotta tell you something. I'm gonna probably lack engagement here the next two weeks. Just wanted to let you know. So when you have engagement, make sure, much like communication, it can be a very wide topic. There's a lot of interpretations. A lot of interpretations. And we tend to judge people very quickly. Well, he's just not engaged. And all of a sudden you find out he had a death in his family and he's just a little bit pulled back. That actually just happened at one of our client sites. So when you are coaching to engagement, you can also coach to specific attributes of the expectation, such as listening attentively without distraction. What are you gonna do to successfully listen to your teammates during that meeting? And what are you gonna do to successfully avoid distraction? On a scale of one to eight, eight, you are always attentive, always ready to listen. You completely put things like your phone away and you don't pay attention to distractions. Or one, sometimes you can be a little inconsistent. Where would you rate yourself and why? When they rate themselves, typically they go in the middle. You ask, what can we do to move you towards an eight? What are the things that we could do to move you towards an eight? So again, the questions are critical. Think about a staff meeting. Asking that question before, at the start, and maybe even at the end of the meeting. What are you gonna do to successfully ask your teammates to support our definition of engagement? You could ask that before, at the start, and then maybe at the end of the meeting, you might go around the room and say, everybody write on a note card. What is one thing that you did to represent our definition of engagement successfully? And maybe what was a challenge for you? And then what you're doing is you're breeding that engagement. Let's be candid. How often do we have conversations with someone and they start texting or they start peeking at their phone? This is something that I'll never forget. I remember sharing that concept. The minute you look at a phone and someone demonstrates a lack of intensiveness or engagement, whatever you wanna call it, it is over. Because where people typically go is, mentally they get to this very manic state of, he never listens to me. And then they tell other people. That's why when you coach people, spend eight to 12 minutes. Don't try to coach for 45 straight minutes. That's a long time to maintain attentiveness and engagement. So make sure you're asking those questions that prep and get people to reflect upon after engagement has actually occurred.