These eight aspects, and these eight precisely worded items, validly predict sustained team performance:

1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.

1. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.

1. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.

1. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.

1. My teammates have my back.

1. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.

1. I have great confidence in my company’s future.

1. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

You might notice a few things about these items right away. First, the team members are not directly rating their team leader or their company on anything—they are rating only their own feelings and experiences.

We see similar patterns on all eight of the questions—we see, in other words, that when we zero in on the critical aspects of our experience at work, they vary more team-to-team than they do company-to-company. Any ideas—like the idea of culture—that rest on the assumption that our experience of a company is uniform, no matter where we sit, don’t hold up. Any ideas—again, like the idea of culture—that rest on the assumption that our experience will vary company to company are incomplete, because our experience will vary more within a company than between companies.

Second, we know that if you do happen to work on a team you are twice as likely to score high on the eight engagement items, and that this trend linking engagement to teams extends to multiple teams—in fact, the most engaged group of workers across the working world are those who work on five distinct teams.

Third, just like Lisa, those team members who said they trusted their team leader were twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work.

...we discovered that (at least at Cisco) there are two factors of engagement within the Engagement Pulse. The first factor comprises all four “me” items together with the two “we” items that ask about team environment, and so consisted of:

• At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. (Me)

• I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. (Me)

• I know I will be recognized for excellent work. (Me)

• In my work, I am always challenged to grow. (Me)

• In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. (We)

• My teammates have my back. (We)

We chose to call this factor team engagement. The other factor comprised the remaining two “we” items:

• I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. (We)

• I have great confidence in my company’s future. (We)

We chose to call this factor company engagement.

The subtlety here is that, as we saw above, the feeling of enthusiasm about a company’s mission, and confidence in its future, still vary team to team. In other words, our experience of our company is significantly mediated by our experience of our team.