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.

The more frequent sense-making rituals you establish on your team, the more information you will liberate, the more intelligence you will generate, and the more trust you will engender. Trust can never emerge from secrecy. Frequency creates safety.

When we carry our competencies across the measurement bridge, we enter a fake and dangerous world—as a tool of assessment, order and control, they are worse than useless. But as public signifiers for what we deem most important, they are another way we can cascade meaning in our organizations, and thereby help our leaders and teams understand what’s most important.

One way to think of these results is to imagine a team leader having three distinct jobs. Her first is to ensure her team members feel connected to the purpose and future of the company, even though she may not directly define those. Her second is to ensure that her team members, as a group, understand and support one another. And her third is to ensure that her team members, individually, understand what’s expected of them and how they can do their best work now and in the future, all while feeling recognized for who they are.

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.