Parkour Engagement
Parkour. Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment. I trust managers and leaders who want to foster engagement can adopt a Parkour-like mindset even if they can’t run up a cubicle wall, tumble off of an office chair, and do a back flip from the top of their desk.
Practice the Parkour mindset. I love how Parkour artists move through urban landscapes. The video below of Damien Walters is an excellent demonstration of both Parkour movement and and training. Damien demonstrates a very high level of engagement with his work. Here are some of the characteristics I believe we can bring from Parkour to our approaches to engagement:
- creativity
- jump
- engage
- movement
- agility
- alacrity
- speed
- shifts
- strength
- adaptation
- innovation
- transformation
- playfulness
- flexibility
Watch this short 3 minute video and be inspired to move differently and with full engagement through your organization.
If the video above fails to open or appear in this window, click here.
If you want to learn more about Parkour, read the wikipedia entry by clicking here.
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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2400+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.
Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.
Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com
Interesting take!
The characteristics of Parkour are definitely a creative way to look at what and how engagement should be carried out – but then therein lies the (“proverbial”) line-management challenge – how do they effectively drive engagement and delivery!
In South Africa this would definitely require significant shifts in how management is practiced – something to consider when engaging leadership!