And I mean the leader in all aspects of our lives, at work, in our communities and in our homes?

This is an urgent issue.

It's not a light question.

That's because research from Gallup shows that, amazingly worldwide on Lee, 13% of people are engaged in their work.

And despite company's best efforts to address this problem, that number has barely budged over the past decade.

This is also an issue in our homes.

This is what engagement looks like in my household.

My teenagers are totally engaged with their devices, their world, their friends, but not with me.

As the parent.

I am a distraction, an annoyance when I try to get them to do things that I want them to do.

If you're not a parent yourself, you likely remember what it was like to be a teenager and the annoyance that you felt when your parents try to tell you how to drive or dress or date.

But at some point, parents have to trust their teenagers, people who successfully parent they're teenagers into adulthood, eventually say to them, I know you can do this now on your own.

I think it's time for Russell known how to do this at work as well.

Now, when we think about hierarchies, many of them exists in organizations today.

Well, hierarchies were created at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to create efficiency and scale.

Hierarchies work great.

If you manufacture Ridge, it's where the information in the expertise you need to make decisions reside only at the top.

But in our modern, digitally connected world, efficiency pales against the need for innovation, for change and for speed.

The people who have to make decisions and traces around.

All of these changes reside at the edges and at the bottom of the organization.

Leaders today have to trust that those employees will use good judgment when they have to make decisions like in the past would have been set up the ladder for somebody else to decide.

In order for those employees to do this, they have to be able to have two way non hierarchical conversations throughout the organization.

That's so they can gather the information needed to make those decisions and to take action.

This is not some future utopian world.

This is one that exists today.

One example of this is the restaurant chain, the bread robin.

They have a very digital savvy employee base.

87% of them are millennials.

They recently introduced a new menu item called the Pig Out Style Burger, and one of the things they did was those restaurants.

Service went out and gathered customer feedback.

They ask those people, What did you think of this?

And they posted that feedback on the company's internal social network, and it wasn't all good.

Executives quickly realized that they had to make a change, and they tapped those employers for suggestions on what to do.

The result.

Employees suggestions, went to the test kitchens at headquarters and then back into the fuel to get in less than 30 days.

That's compared to 6 to 12 months.

It would normally have taken what Red Robin realize was that employee engagement wasn't about employees talking with each other.

It was really about them being heard and that their voices making a difference.

But there's a big problem.

Managers was sit between those executives and the front lines, absolutely a poor, this new openness.

That's because those executives are going around and talk to their direct reports, and they fight this change tooth and nail because they feel everything is in control.

Now those middle managers can be a big obstacle to change, but they're also a crucial part of the solution.

I've done a lot of thinking and researching about what we can do to address this problem, and I've identified three things that we can do.

The first is that we have to create a culture of sharing.

Now, in hierarchies, layers are designed to filter information up and to push information down.

We were taught that to be successful, we had to hoard information.

But in a networked organization, just the opposite is true.

Managers become facilitators.

They accelerate the speed and spread of information throughout the organization.

One of the best examples that ever seen of this was on the U.

S.

Navy aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz.

In a radical act of transparency, they invited 16 bloggers to spend 24 hours on board.

I was fortunate enough to be one of those bloggers.

The captain wants a run board, encouraged us to talk to anybody about anything at any time.

He knew that he couldn't control what his sailors would say to any of us, but he had confidence that they knew what to share and what to keep private.

That's because they have a culture of sharing in place.

Then they practice this every single day because value that their lives and their missions dependent on the ability for anybody to speak up at the right time.

How many of you would feel comfortable allowing an outsider to come into your organization and walk about Annette escorted for even one hour?

If you had a strong culture of sharing in place, you would feel confident and comfortable that this would be fine.

The second thing that organizations can do has to practice follow a ship if you think about it.

The size and quality of your network today determines how much power influence you have, not your title Now.

One of the key things that you can see is that when people share with each other, they develop this relationship.

One manager that I know posted internal video updates about a project that she was working on.

She used those updates to engage people throughout the organization, but she was doing was actively building relationships and a network of followers.

When it came time to implement that project, she kept her followers for volunteers, people who would venture champion that project in the implementation in their own departments.

Now, if middle managers were encouraged to develop their own followership than if their titles would change or even disappeared, they would nonetheless retain that power, the influence and the effectiveness.

But how do you actually do this?

How do you actually go about and create that?

Well, I think one of the key things to think about the third thing, which is how do you use networks to create meaningful decisions now?

Employees and managers are smart.

They are not going to engage unless they know that their engagement is going to result in the organization moving forward and also themselves.

But how did you get them to engage in the first place?

The key is to get decisionmakers involved.

One CEO who I know did this and made this ship by asking employees through out the organization to make suggestions around what processes and which technologies the company should eliminate.

And they did this on the company's internal collaboration platform.

Now with over 800 suggestions submitted.

The CEO then started Prioritized, which wants to cut again with those inputs from employees.

Well, when the middle managers and the executives heard that this was happening, they started to get involved to a CZ.

Well, this was the turning point, the place where the manager's realized that those networks were being used to get real work done Using networks to make critical decisions is the Onley way that we can gain traction.

I've just described three ways that we can lead in the digital era.

But changing organizations with sharing followership in networking does not happen overnight.

With these three things have in common is that they require us to give up the traditional notion that power and influence comes from being in control.

This is not an easy idea to let go off, but just like when your routines and our parents had to let go in order for us to grow, we need to empower and engage our employees, let go and trust that they will do the right thing.

This is the only way that we as leaders, are going to be up to harness their passion, their energy and their creativity.

Thank you very much.