Interview By Alex Miranda

NEW YORK – Telling your workers to be more engaged just won’t work. Leadership is about putting mechanisms in place that will encourage their progress.

The people we work with are not so unlike the plants the farmer grows—we can’t simply tell them to produce. The growing happens within them, and for people to want to work rather than having to work is actually a matter of managing progress, not people.

A humanistic, holistic mindful leader arranges moments of progress with gratitude and emphathy. In the same way that a farmer tills the soil to help seeds germinate, a leader may till the workflow to allow meaningful progress and the engagement that follows to take root.