Engagement by Design: How Leaders Shape the Experience of Work

Employee engagement in the U.S. recently hit its lowest level in a decade.
According to Gallup’a 2024 Engagement Survey, only 31% of employees are engaged at work, and 17% are actively disengaged. Engagement peaked at 36% in 2020 but has been trending downward ever since, exposing deeper issues in leadership, culture, and execution.

Engagement is often presented as something employees alone choose. But there is another side to the story: Engagement isn’t just about how staff choose to engage. It’s about how leaders choose to engage with staff.

From Measurement to Meaning

Tools like Clifton Strengths can help us see engagement differently. The Clifton Strengths framework is often introduced to an organization as a onetime “team building” event. While these are usually well-received, many more benefits can be realized when leaders take the time to really study their team’s results. In doing so, they will realize will gain a lot of insight as to what energizes their people, what drains them, and what they need to do their best work.

Clifton Strengths provides:

• A language for what comes naturally to each person.

• Insight into how people contribute and collaborate.

• A bridge between individual purpose and organizational performance.

When leaders use this information to shape roles, goals, and recognition, strengths they will have  tangible tactical tools to further the success of both the individual and the organization.

Engagement Is a Relationship, Not a Metric

Gallup’s research points to specific patterns in why engagement falls , and each has a leadership counterpart.

From Strengths to Alignment

At Work Wise Studio, Clifton Strengths is the first step in the ALIGN practice, a practical framework for translating insight into action:

Absorb: Gather insight from people and data. Listen to what’s working and what’s missing.
Legitimize: Validate that input by integrating it into leadership conversations and decisions.
Integrate: Align strengths, roles, and goals so individuals can contribute where they add the most value.
Grow: Build capability through coaching, reflection, and iteration.
Nurture: Protect progress and reinforce behaviors that sustain engagement over time.

Together, Clifton Strengths and ALIGN help organizations move from “what we know about our people” to “how we lead because of what we know.”

 Engagement Challenge                                                                     

Engagement Challenge: Clarity of expectations has dropped sharply

• ALIGN creates shared understanding by connecting strategy, culture, and execution into  clear roadmap.

Engagement Challenge: Fewer employees feel cared for or supported.

• ALIGN integrates people-centered practices and ensures leaders listen deeply to staff insights.

Engagement Challenge: Development opportunities are lacking.

• ALIGN strengthens capacity through leadership coaching, team development, and resilience building.

Engagement Challenge: Engagement is lowest among younger employees.

• ALIGN invites diverse voices into planning, surfacing insights across generations and roles.

Engagement Challenge: Managers themselves are disengaged.

• ALIGN equips managers with coaching tools that build trust and accountability.

This is where Clifton Strengths and the ALIGN framework work together.
Clifton Strengths shines a light on individual potential. ALIGN gives organizations a way to act on what they learn.

When Leaders Engage Differently, So Do Their Teams

Consider this example:
A leadership team invested in Clifton Strengths because the leader felt that his team was while his team was responsive to requests, it was more reactive than proactive, and led to wasted time, inefficient use of resources , poor communication and times of real tension.

Through the ALIGN process, the team revisited their Strengths results,  not as a personality inventory, but as strategic input. They realized their collective profile was heavy on Execution and Relationship Building, but light on Strategic Thinking and Influencing
The result: Strong collaboration, excellent can-do attitude, but the work was reactive.

Once the team absorbed that insight and legitimized it in planning, they shifted how they worked. They slowed down. They did a retrospective of the previous year and identified patterns to inform practices. They used their excellent relationship building strengths to engage stakeholders in better planning. Deadlines were met without burnout. Communication improved. A year later, both client satisfaction surveys and employee engagement surveys had noticeably improved.

The change was not about working harder.
It was about working wiser.

The Next Level of Engagement

Gallup has long shown that employees who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be engaged at work. But that insight alone does not create change. Engagement rises only when organizations build systems that recognize and use those strengths consistently.

That means:

• Leaders must model curiosity and reflection, not just performance management.

• Managers must connect individual strengths to team goals.

• Organizations must nurture cultures that make engagement a shared responsibility.

In other words, engagement is a leadership practice.

Taking It Forward

If your organization has already invested in Clifton Strengths, you have already taken the first step toward deeper engagement.

The next step is alignment: using that knowledge to shape how you lead, communicate, and grow.

Ask yourselves:

• How are we engaging with our people, not just measuring their engagement with us?

• Where can we better absorb, legitimize, integrate, grow, and nurture what we have learned from our Strengths results?

When leaders listen this way, engagement stops being a survey score and becomes part of the culture  where clarity, trust, and accountability fuel success.

Because engagement isn’t something we get from people. It’s something we design with them.

#EmployeeEngagement #Leadership Development #CliftonStrengths #WorkWiseStudio

Introducing ALIGN: The studio practiCe

In today's environment, change is not a special project or a temporary interruption; it is the environment we all work in. Organizations are constantly evolving, responding to new information, shifting priorities, and emerging needs.

Over the years, whether I was a staff member, a leader, or now, a consultant, I have learned something from every single person I’ve worked with. Staff and stakeholders offer valuable insights about daily challenges, short-term priorities, long-range possibilities, and the way forward. Yet too often, organizations overlook that wisdom.

Artists work differently. Whether painting, composing, or choreographing, they pay attention to what stirs inside them. They honor it. They give it form. That is how something new takes shape.

I believe organizations can and should do the same. The Studio Practice begins with listening to yourself: your thoughts, reactions, and instincts, and honoring what you notice by giving it words. Our wisdom is the sum of our experience. Each person holds a piece of it, and no one’s perspective is “wrong” when it reflects their lived experience and innate strengths. When organizations create space for people to access and share that wisdom, transformation begins. Because when people are invited to bring their wisdom to life, organizations do not just adapt to change; they thrive in it.

That is why I developed ALIGN: The Studio Practice Framework, a practical approach for bringing wisdom into the center of how leaders and teams work. ALIGN is designed for today’s reality. It is not just a framework for managing change, but a way of leading and operating in motion, where reflection, clarity, and alignment become everyday practices, and strategy, culture, and execution stay connected even as conditions shift.

How ALIGN Works

ALIGN represents five moves that help leaders and teams turn insight into aligned action. We call them moves because alignment is not a one-time process; it is a dynamic practice. Each move represents a deliberate action leaders can take to respond wisely to what the moment requires.

🔹 Absorb: Begin by seeking to understand what is really happening. Instead of rushing into solutions, listen carefully to people, systems, and lived experience.
🔹 Legitimize: Insights gain strength when they are shared and clarified. Turn observations into shared priorities and a roadmap that leadership owns together.
🔹 Integrate: Direction must translate into practice. Embed new approaches into daily operations, planning, and decision-making.
🔹 Grow: Change endures when people grow. Build capacity and confidence so teams can carry progress forward.
🔹 Nurture: Momentum lasts when culture is tended over time. Steward progress, celebrate learning, and adapt as conditions evolve.

Why it matters
Alignment is how vision becomes daily work. With ALIGN, you have a practical way to hear what is true, set what matters, and move together even as conditions shift. When alignment becomes a shared practice, organizations stay clear-headed, connected, and capable of meeting what comes next.

Alignment prompt
What is a small move you can make today that will help to align strategy, culture, and execution?