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.

...for those employees given mainly positive attention—that is, attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them—the ratio of engaged to disengaged rose to sixty to one.

Positive attention, in other words, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. (It’s also, if you’re keeping score, twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people, but we haven’t yet come across a management theory that advocates ignoring people.)

Of those who strongly agreed that they trusted their team leader 45 percent were Fully Engaged. Of those who didn’t strongly agree only 6 percent were Fully Engaged. A worker is twelve times more likely to be Fully Engaged if she trusts her team leader.

In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate from Gallup data collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.

Organizations have created such disengaging places to work precisely because they haven’t understood the power of teams. If you are not part of a team, our data shows, less than 10 percent of you feel engaged, resilient, and connected. This goes some way to explaining why we learned that health care workers and educators are the two least engaged and least resilient professions: neither hospitals nor schools have been organized around teams.