Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini, wrote Yes!

Yes! outlines 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive.

If you want to influence others to higher levels of employee engagement strive to enhance your request with the personal touch.

An ounce of personalized extra effort is worth a pound of persuasion. the more personalized you make a request, the more likely you’ll be to get someone to agree that request. More specifically, this research shows that in the office or in the community, a personalized sticky not could highlight the importance of your reports and communications and prevent them from becoming the proverbial needle in a haystack of other reports, letters, and mailings that are also vying for attention. What’s more, the timeliness and quality of compliance with your request are likely to be enhance as well.

Photo credit: and yes I said yes by http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsgreg/707054525/

Reflection is more than looking in a mirror.

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Photo credit: Sunset & the Thinker by http://flickr.com/photos/esparta/1584333702/

Employee Engagement is all about work.

Speaking about the daily activities in which humans engage, everything is work — being alive and in a body is already work. Every day there is eating and sh..ting and cleaning up. There is brushing and bathing and flossing. Every day there is thinking and caring and creating. So there is no escape from work — it’s everywhere.  for Zen students there’s no work time and leisure time; there’s just lifetime, daytime and nighttime. Work is something deep and dignified — it’s what we are born to do and what we feel most fulfilled in doing. ~ Norman Fischer, Zen monk abbot, (From Howard Gardner’s Responsibility at Work).

Photo Credit: Blue Sky! by http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/1065840918/

To attain high levels of employee engagement I believe we must learn from artists and how they approach their art. Artists give us exquisite examples of people fully engaged in their work. How about a young musician that creates beautiful music on a thermin without every touching the instrument? I think her work hints at the sensitivity leaders and managers need to draw high levels of engagement out of everyone working.

From Wikipedia:

The theremin is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. It is unique in that it was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The controlling section generally consists of two metal antennas to sense the relative position of the player’s hands. These sensors control audio for frequency from one hand, and volume from the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. To play the theremin, the player moves his hands around the two metal antennas, which control the instrument’s frequency and amplitude volume.

Virtuoso Pamelia Kurstinplays and discusses her theremin,  She excavates a dusty artifact from the prehistoric strata of electronic music — and demonstrates how to squeeze soul from an instrument you can’t even touch.

Watch the video by clicking below or go to the TedTalks site by clicking here.