I often say that the best way to empower and engage people is through a clear objective, clear rules, feedback and invitation, a sense of control, progress, belonging and acting for something greater than ourselves (reread: modernity, agility, commitment).

How to operationalize these recommendations: clarify? Explain? The vast majority of time for a leader, for a manager, for a mentor, is spent explaining, making explicit, questioning. As in therapy, before wanting to solve a problem, or go further, achieve an objective, you must clarify and share it. Transparency, visual management, dialogue are at the heart of the practices we expect. First communicate, align, clarify before governing.

But invitation probably remains the most difficult notion to grasp in our organizations. Yet it is one of the most powerful. How to invite? Several concrete applications. Following the example of Jim and Michele McCarthy, why not invite teams to form themselves according to the organization’s projects? The first reflex is to imagine a bunch of friends immediately forming while forgetting the project expectations. But the invitation is not: “make a bunch of friends” but: “try to form the teams as best as possible to succeed in these projects”. Therefore, like any normally constituted living system, everyone understanding and integrating the accountability that goes hand in hand with the granted freedom, everyone will do their best trying to find the best alchemy between a team of friends and the skills required for project success. The engagement linked to the invitation probably allowing the best balance between friendship and competence. A project makes everyone flee? The invitation makes this visible: no one wants to do this project, and probably for good reasons, so it is obvious, apparent, clear, that special measures will be needed to handle it. We learn this clearly, and quite early.

Another example: meetings, those famous meetings where everyone feels obliged to respect the invitation (what a paradox). Imagine if the invitation became real? Several scenarios: of the twelve people the big boss invited, none come. The first hypothesis is that it’s possible the meeting is useless and frankly all these people were right to skip it. Another hypothesis, this meeting was indeed important, but no one understood its content, seriousness or importance. The big boss realizes at that moment that his formulation and message were not the right ones, that he must revise his approach to clearly explain the interest and meaning of this meeting. Another hypothesis: everyone understood that the meeting was important, but important things, everyone has plenty of. And no one knew if this one was more important than the other things they’re working on. The big boss has just measured that beyond good communication, he must govern, primarily arbitrate, prioritize; it’s up to him to indicate what to stop, what to halt to focus on this new meeting (so he must also know what’s happening right now in his organization).

Another scenario: only four people come out of the twelve invited. These are probably the people who grasped the importance of the meeting, and understood the prioritization to place on this meeting. In a word: these are the right people, those who understood and who have the time to handle it.

Another scenario, the unfortunate traditional scenario: everyone came, because everyone knows that an invitation from the big boss cannot be refused. During the meeting everyone nods their head (while glancing at their mobile or laptop). At the end the big boss is satisfied. But he won’t be able to say: who really understood the message? And among them, who really understood the importance, the prioritization of the subject, and who can prioritize this subject? He is blind. Without invitation everything is just illusion.

One last example of invitation: Open Adoption. This is a technology for leading change. It is based on invitation: everyone is invited to participate, according to the theme everyone is invited to propose initiatives, invited to implement these initiatives (or those of other people) in the coming months (until the next Open Adoption day). This invitation has several virtues: it leaves the freedom to try and turn back, this is crucial in change management, an imposed and definitive change is the one that can generate the greatest resistance. It leaves the freedom for real adaptation to context: we do what is possible to do according to the context (will, desire, environment, history, etc.) and while respecting the theme. This invitation makes other more obscure paths obsolete: here is a public space for expression, this is the one that must be used.

Another virtue: it makes blatant the integration or not of each person in the movement of the organization. The one who never comes, who never has proposals, who never implements anything, over an indicative period of time. That person questions their integration in the organization, and their reason for being.

Inviting poses essential questions: what do I want? What do I desire? Am I comfortable in this framework, this place? And it is essential to ask them.

This is an excerpt from “living organizations” which I set myself to complete in early 2016 (with your encouragement please), and this part is very inspired by the conversations I was able to have with Dan Mezick in 2014 and which have been able to marinate since then in my mind.