Engagement. Leadership wants it, funders require it, publics demand it. Inclusive and participatory governance, production and design, collaborative decision-making, urban planning, education, human service, research, even health care aspires to engage. Engagement, in its current iteration, is a professional form of relationship intended to enable substantive inclusion, deeper understanding, and greater accountabilities. Really? Only a professional form of relationship? I don’t agree. In this post, I unpack this thing called engagement and give 4 keys to its authentic practice.
I recently wrote a piece for physicians (ref below – link forthcoming) challenging them to consider that relationships are the foundation of clinical practice. Most of the time, our interaction with our physician is a carefully scripted encounter designed to get to the REAL reason you came to see them. That is, to attend to your body. This often presumes an essential split between the body, mind and the life we live by choice or under conditions of our unchoosing. The assumption that the body is all that really matters is cooked into medical practice in the same way that the mind is all that really matters is cooked into counseling, poverty to human service advocates, test scores to educators, or quarterly profits to businesses.
There is nothing wrong per se with understanding the most important part of your work. After all, we want educators to track progress, companies to be profitable and physicians to know their physiology. However, we might not want teachers to relate to their students as test takers, companies to their customers as wallets, or doctors to their patients as biochemical pathologies. I have said it a many times, to a hammer everything looks like a nail and/but people are not nails. People are smart and know when they have been met with a hammer, even a kind and competent, helpful one.
Engagement of any kind is about relationships and relationships are tricky. A client once joked about the hard work of relationships, “If you think your relationships are easy, then they are only easy for YOU!” In my article to physicians, I outline 4 keys to engagement. I think they apply to more than medical care so I have adapted them below to apply to most forms of engagement ergo most kinds of relationships. Importantly, whatever kind of relationship you engage in, attending to these 4 keys will form a foundation for lasting, affirming, productive, fun and alive connections. Importantly, these keys can become part of YOUR practice. Read on.
Four Keys to Engagement
1 – Be curious. Ask real questions that recognize the expertise of the person or people with whom you encounter. We all need help from others. Asking real questions means you recognize this truth. A doctor needs a patient’s story. A researcher needs a research participant. As students we need good teachers. Collaborators need good partners. We all need good people in our lives. To wit, patients, leaders, students, partners, collaborators, experiential experts of all kinds. A real question is one for which you do not already have an answer. Working with a person or a group to arrive at a prescribed outcome is one kind of relationship. However, is that the kind you really need and desire? Is it why others are relating to you?
2 – Get uncomfortable. Asking real questions should make us uncomfortable. We should get out of our comfort zones. Discomfort is a good thing. Engaging with others as the experts of their own lives, by which I mean those closer to the object of our mutual concern, requires humility. If we stay in our social and intellectual orbit, our emotional comfort zones, our worldviews, we will never actually meet people who can teach us lessons we may need to learn or hear the lessons from those with whom we already interact. We will “relate” to them but not learn from them. Discomfort is where authentic engagement can begin. Otherwise, your encounter is just a transactional script where little learning can occur.
3 – Know your place: Be someone you’d like to know. We all come from somewhere important. Knowing your place means doing your homework. Not only about the people and places you encounter, but also about yourself. After all, there are reasons you don’t know what you don’t know.… and you should work to discover what those reasons are. Excellent clinicians acknowledge the limits of their knowledge and skill. Think how annoying people who think they know something are when they really don’t. Also, it makes for poor engagement practice to not understand your own limits or that you have some. And, it is not a competition. It’s a commitment.
4 – People are NOT their problems, their wallets, their bodies, their test scores, their market preferences, or their social needs. Imagine how it feels to be treated as if you are your most obvious attributes or worse your deepest struggles. People may experience poverty, insecurity or illness. They may be wealthy, beautiful or creative. However, a relationally competent person understands that we all experience challenges and that we all have creativity, intelligences, hopes, dreams and talents that motivate and enable our lives. If you want more authentic engagement, relate to people for the complex folk they actually are. No one likes to be treated one dimensionally.
In my practice, I have had the privilege of working with a lot of people who take seriously their own engagement with others. That is, they want more than what is being asked of them by a boss or funder or client. They want to grow as people connected to their world in authentic ways. They want to connect in all ways, not just in the instrumental ways their professional role demands in that moment. “The work” as you soon discover, is that wonderful golden thread that enables your practice to grow, your business to flourish, your organization to be inclusive and equitable, and your relationships to become resources for you and those with whom you live, work and play. Finally, many people think engagement is a professional relationship. To which I always ask, If you treat people in your personal life differently than those you work with in your professional life, what kind of relationships are you trying to grow?
Montoya, Michael J. 2019. Relational Politics of Clinical Care: Lessons from the University of California PRIME – LC program in Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine: A Case Book for Treating the Social Determinants of Health, Helena Hansen, MD and Jonathan Metzl, MD (eds), Springer: New York, London.