To create pervasive disengagement, ignore your people. If you pay them no attention whatsoever—no positive feedback; no negative feedback; nothing—your team’s engagement will plummet, so much so that for every one engaged team member you will have twenty disengaged team members.

Paradoxically, then, the more your high-priority interrupts involve catching your people doing things wrong (so you can fix them), the less productive each person will become in the short term, and the less growth you’ll see from your team members in the long run. Finding itself in negative-criticism territory, the human brain stiffens, tenses, and—in meaningful ways—resists improvement. Machines and processes don’t do that. You can fix a machine, you can fix a process, but you can’t fix a person in the same way—people aren’t toasters. So, when it comes to your people, what should be your high-priority interrupt? If what you want is improvement, then it should be whenever someone on your team does something that really works. The goal is to consciously spend your days alert for those times when someone on your team does something so easily and effectively that it rocks you, just a little, and then to find a way of telling that person what you just saw.

... the positive-to-negative ratio you’ll arrive at is somewhere between three to one and five to one—three to five moments of appreciative attention for every one piece of negative feedback. While there is no need to obsess over the mathematical precision of the ratios, the science suggests that if you aim for this level of deliberate imbalance you and your team will be well served.

This suggests that team members who check in with their leader frequently have an enhanced sense of being able to use their strengths every day, of being recognized for excellent work, and of having opportunities to grow. Although this study did not distinguish between correlation and causation (we could not tell whether the increased frequency of conversation led to increased engagement or vice versa), subsequent research, a portion of which is described in the final section of this appendix, indicated that it was in fact the increased attention, via frequent conversation, that led to the increased levels of engagement.

A 2018 Gallup study found that barely a third of US employees were fully engaged in their work—where engagement is defined as being “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to work.” The majority of employees, 53 percent, were “not engaged,” while 13 percent—the maliciously compliant—were “actively disengaged.” Globally, the situation is even worse, with 15 percent engaged, 67 percent disengaged, and 18 percent actively disengaged.