I went down a rabbit hole, and what an interesting rabbit hole it was.
It started simply enough. Board leaders and executive directors asked for more ideas about how to increase board engagement. They wanted strategies and tools. The more I heard the request, the more I mulled what exactly we mean by engagement.
[As I’ve written before, clarity is necessary if we are to shift behavior.]
Turns out there is an ecosystem of thinkers who have long studied why people bring energy to their roles—or withhold it. Here’s what they agree on: engagement is not a personality trait. It is actionable information about the environment.
When people consistently struggle to show up, speak up, or follow through, the system is telling us something about how the work is designed. If one person is stuck, it may be personal. If many people are stuck in the same way, we have a design issue.
Understanding Engagement
Engagement is the emotional and intellectual commitment someone has to the organization’s mission. It is characterized by energy, meaning, and focus.
To put a finer point on it, people can be engaged with an organization or the job itself. We experience this regularly in the nonprofit space – a board member who loves the mission but is a no-show when it comes to committee work. High commitment to the cause, low commitment to the work. It is job engagement that moves our mission forward.
Here’s the actionable part: people engage when the environment makes engagement possible. When someone doesn’t participate, our instinct is to jump to some conclusion. They’re too busy. They’ve lost interest. They aren’t committed. But patterns of disengagement are predictable responses to conditions like unclear expectations, low authority, weak feedback, or cultures where it feels risky to speak.
From Individual to System
We can shift from individual to system thinking in two ways: (1) start from where they are stuck or (2) start from the building blocks of engagement.
1. From Stuck
People get stuck for many reasons. These reasons point to gaps in our structure or culture that we can address.
Every stuck point is a clue about structure or culture. Behavior is data.
2. …To engaged
Another way to think about engagement is through a balance of resources and demands.
Engagement rises when people have enough support, clarity, and confidence to meet meaningful challenges.
Engagement falls when demands feel like friction—pointless reporting, unnecessary detail, meetings where nothing moves, or responsibility without authority.
We might think of it as a balance sheet, with resources fueling engagement and demands draining it.
- Resources include structural support, clear decision-making, and the personal strengths individuals bring to their roles.
- Job demands can be both good and bad. A healthy challenge is that consequential work that makes someone feel their effort matters. Friction and boredom through dull meetings, pointless bureaucracy, or being stuck in unnecessary detail, on the other hand, drains energy and engagement.
This lens helps us see where support, readiness, meaning, or safety may be missing.
Now what?
Engagement is shaped by conditions, and we can shape the kind of conditions that support energetic participation in our mission. Four themes show up across the research:
- Purpose: Do people see a clear “line of sight” between what they are asked to do and why it matters?
- Safety: Can they raise questions, offer ideas, and disagree without embarrassment or penalty?
- Growth: Are they learning, stretching, and deepening their understanding of the work or the community?
- Connection: Do they feel part of something, or alone in the effort?
We can redesign our systems to create these conditions through:
- Clear roles so expectations and decision rights are visible.
- Feedback loops so people know their effort made a difference.
- Autonomy so individuals exercise judgment instead of simply complying.
- Support so participation feels possible, not risky.
- Opportunities to contribute meaningfully so time is spent on work that advances the mission.
When participation drops, we can change the questions we ask:
Instead of asking, What’s wrong with our people?
we can ask, What about our system makes contribution difficult right now?
Engagement is not magic. It follows the environment we create.
This article is informed by research on engagement and motivation, including the work of William Kahn on psychological conditions for engagement, Wilmar Schaufeli and colleagues on the Job Demands–Resources model, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan on Self-Determination Theory, and Julie Dirksen’s work on diagnosing barriers to behavior change.