Psst…want to buy an engaged culture for your business?

What business wouldn’t cut off their proverbial arm for an engaged culture? Higher productivity, better attendance, happier employees… If you can do it yourself, it costs next to nothing to create — just care and cultivation. That said, just like the dentist doesn’t perform her own root canals, business is notoriously unskilled and often strangely unwilling to create and maintain an engaged culture.

HR professionals can object strenuously to this point all they like, but as mentioned in a prior blog post, culture cannot be apperceived properly from an internal viewpoint. At best, people inside an organization are essentially acculturated and powerless to actually see things as they truly are. It’s far less a knock on them than a statement of universal truth.

Ambient belonging has been identified by my colleague Dr. Leeno Karumanchery as the secret sauce in engagement; engagement itself isn’t really enough unless you have people on the inside of the culture wiling to expand the culture to include people who don’t look like them…in other words, Diversity.

We might also call it something like ​‘assertive inclusion’. If it is important for me personally to make sure to include my out-colleagues if I’m in the in-crowd, I’m assertively including them in the organization which will create a virtuous cycle of building and maintaining an engaged diverse business culture.

But beneath all of that is another ​‘secret sauce’ which is simply Emotional Intelligence. The higher the EQ of an organization, the more engaged and willing to cultivate diversity the culture will be.

In summary, high EQ creates a foundation which a platform of engagement can build a culture anyone would break their backs to work within.