254: "Engagement Vs Connection: Why One Comes After The Other" (Reflections On Jason Lauritsen)
🧠 Erik’s Take
Erik reflects on how the conversation with Jason Lauritsen landed because it challenges a very familiar leadership pattern: treating “connection” like something that happens after work starts, rather than something leaders design before performance expectations are set. What stuck is the inversion. If connection drives motivation, then building relationships and meaning is not a soft add-on. It is upstream management. Erik also feels the discomfort of how often leaders measure what is easy to measure, then run out of space to do what actually creates momentum.
🎯 Top Insights from the Interview
- Connection should be treated as upstream of performance, not a byproduct of working well together.
- Highly connected employees reported 6.7x more motivation, suggesting the conditions for motivation can be intentionally created.
- Engagement is the degree to which people are willing and able to perform now, while connection can shape engagement before the results show up.
- Organizational resonance, the link between purpose and day-to-day work, correlated most strongly with outcomes and is least frequently experienced.
🧩 The Personal Layer
Erik contrasts his own instincts about management with what the research implies. He admits he has often thought in calendars and deliverables first, then hoped relationships would grow “along the way.” This episode reframed that hope into a leadership responsibility. It also surfaces a tension: Erik agrees that connection takes intention, not necessarily more time, but he recognizes how hard it is for leaders to show up differently without adding a new task list. The uncomfortable part is realizing the work may be less about doing more and more about doing the same things with different depth
🧰 From Insight to Action
- Rework one recurring leadership touchpoint (check-in, 1:1, team meeting) to include a deliberate connection prompt and a clearer intention.
- Audit how the organization connects purpose to execution: ask whether people can explain how their work advances direction, not just what the mission says.
- Experiment with small practices that target connection types: a question of the day for interpersonal connection and specific shoutouts for recognition.
- When engagement is low or flat, shift the question from “How do we raise scores?” to “What conditions are we failing to create that would increase motivation and willingness?”
🗣️ Notable Quotes
- “Maybe it isn’t something we do after we’ve taken care of the important business activities. Maybe it itself is one of the important business activities.”
- “Engagement is largely a trailing indicator. It tells you how people feel about the experience they’ve already had.”
- “Connection gives us something we can work on to improve what happens next.”
- “Most organizations have some version of a mission, vision, or values, but employees often don’t have a meaningful connection between those words and what they actually do every day.”
🔗 Links & Resources
