Written by Head of Marketing Josh Trebilcock
In today’s world of relentless change, shifting employee expectations and hybrid ways of working, keeping people truly engaged has never been more challenging. The pace of transformation means priorities evolve quickly, and many leaders are grappling with how to keep their teams connected to purpose when the ground keeps moving beneath them.
- Leadership’s Role in Driving Employee Engagement
- Why every business needs to view employee engagement as a competitive advantage
- The Engagement Gap: Why Most Leaders Miss It
- 1. Set a Clear Gold Medal Everyone Can Believe In
- 2. Empower Leaders to Lead Engagement, Not Just Measure It
- 3. Build Shared Ownership with the 3Ms Model
- 4. Make Recognition Routine and Meaningful
- 5. Simplify to Amplify: Focus on What Truly Makes the Boat Go Faster
- Lessons from the Olympic Boat
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, we’ve observed that employee engagement starts (and too often stops) at the top.
When we ask executive teams about their engagement challenges, we often hear:
- “People aren’t motivated.”
- “Our leaders and managers aren’t communicating the vision.”
- “We’ve done engagement surveys, but behaviour never really changes.”
- “We’ve spent months on the strategy – but it’s not landing” – The message gets lost somewhere between the boardroom and the front line.
- “Our people say they’re committed, but the energy just isn’t there.” – Or, if it is, it’s channelled into the wrong things
These are symptoms, not causes. The real cause is usually a disconnect between the executive team’s ambition and the employee’s experience.
Top performing CEOs we work with don’t delegate engagement to HR. They lead it from the front. They make sure they are aligned with their executive team and get straight on their story together. They tell that story of where the organisation is heading, in a relatable way and create clarity on how everyone contributes to that journey. Then they consistently reiterate it so that everyone understands their role in achieving it.
They don’t talk about engagement as just a tick-box metric – they treat it as a strategic lever for performance – it tells them how effectively their people are pulling in the same direction.
Leaders talk a lot about engagement – but too often, they treat it as a ‘nice to have’. It might be talked about as something soft and unessential, sitting a few layers away from the real business priorities of growth, margin, or scalability.
Employee engagement isn’t soft at all. We see it as a hard edge of performance and an active determinant as to whether your strategy gets brought to life, or stalls when it starts to hit the frontline. When your people are engaged, they’re not just turning up; they’re switched on, taking ownership, and rowing in rhythm toward your organisation’s equivalent of Olympic gold.
In 2026, employee engagement is no longer a soft metric – it’s a competitive advantage. For top performing C-Suite leaders, or beyond, this isn’t just about culture – it’s about performance. Engaged employees deliver higher productivity, stronger innovation and better customer outcomes. Disengaged ones? They’re silently slowing your boat.
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, we’ve learned that engagement is about focus, ownership and alignment. Inspired by our Olympic heritage, in the below we share five proven employee engagement strategies for 2026 that will help you motivate and align your people for lasting results.
Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, technological disruption (the evolving, perceived FOMO and real role of AI) and rapid cultural change, it’s no surprise engagement scores are slipping.
In Gallup’s oft-cited latest research they suggest only 23% of employees globally are engaged at work – meaning nearly 8 in 10 people are rowing without conviction or effectively as they could be. For leaders chasing ambitious goals, that’s a huge drag on performance. (You wouldn’t go very fast in a boat with only 2 of the eight + cox were rowing!)
It’s not that leaders don’t care. It’s that they’re often not sure how to get it right. The town halls, pulse surveys and Friday socials all matter – but unless they connect people emotionally and practically to the real direction of the business, they won’t move the dial.
As Olympic Gold Medallist and our Co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis often says:
That’s the mindset engaged teams share. They know the goal, own it, believe in it, and can see exactly how their work contributes to the boat’s speed.
When people can see how their actions contribute to something bigger, engagement becomes intrinsic. As Gallup’s 2025 Workplace Report found, clarity of purpose is now the single biggest driver of motivation.
Every Olympic campaign begins with a bold, unifying target of a gold medal. Businesses need the same.
Your people engage most deeply when they understand what success looks like – and why it matters. That’s why we encourage leaders to define a ‘gold medal goal’: a stretching, measurable ambition that energises effort and gives meaning to the work.
So how can business leaders approach creating a gold medal for themselves?
For one of our clients, Henkel, the whole ACC business faced unprecedented macro-economic challenges, combined with organisational performance being lower than they’d have liked. There was a lack of emotional connection to a compelling ‘gold medal’ outcome or a methodology that drove and aligned day to day actions for teams within these regions against an organisational plan. Together, we worked with each LT to define their ‘gold medal’ ambition and identified the ultimate performance areas (and the critical KPIs within these) that needed to be met to deliver the goals. By doing so it matched up the wider ambition of the business to embed that into every layer of the organisation. Their performance continues to grow as a business (their ways of working, behaviours and alignment to their goal), alongside their results.
Start by asking: what’s your version of Olympic gold – and does everyone in your organisation know what it is? Do they know what it means for them and their role?
→ Find out more: about how we helped Henkel set a clear Gold Medal that enabled clarity and direction
→ Read more: Every Team Needs a Shared Goal
Engagement can’t be delegated. It has to be led.
The most effective CEOs don’t leave engagement to HR – they drive it through visibility, communication and consistent storytelling. They remind people where the organisation is heading, why it matters, and what their role is in making it happen. The way they tell the story might be brought to life in different ways with different specific teams or functions, but they keep coming back to a specific story. For your business’s gold medal goal – what’s your golden thread? What’s the story you need to tell to bring clarity to others?
In our work with senior teams, we’ve seen that when leaders take the time to create space for others to understand that story, ask questions or raise concerns about what that means for them, engagement levels rise naturally. People feel seen, heard and valued.
A study by MIT Sloan found that organisations with visible, people-centred leadership outperform peers by up to 19% on productivity. Visibility isn’t symbolic – it’s a powerful strategic tool to utilise
→ Explore how clarity from the top fuels alignment: How Winning Executive Teams Stay Aligned and Focused
→ Learn how you can get clear on your story, to bring clarity to others: Leading Through Change – Getting Your Story Straight to Bring Clarity to Others
Engagement flourishes when people feel connected to each other and accountable for shared success. That’s where our 3Ms Model – Mutual Desire, Mutual Reliance, and Measurability – comes in.
- Mutual Desire: Everyone genuinely wants the team to win, even if their personal reasons differ.
- Mutual Reliance: Success depends on every individual pulling in sync, creating trust and accountability.
- Measurability: Progress is visible, trackable and celebrated — because people are 76% more likely to achieve goals they can measure (Harvard Business Review).
In Ben Hunt-Davis’s Olympic crew, these three elements transformed a team that finished seventh in the world into gold medallists. Each rower had clarity on their role, trusted their teammates and took responsibility for every inch of progress.
“We became unstoppable when every member of the crew took personal responsibility for the boat’s speed.” – Ben Hunt-Davis
When businesses build this same sense of shared ownership, engagement stops being a nice-to-have initiative – it becomes a way of every person contributing to something bigger than themselves, which we know is a key driving force for building individual motivation.
This can be easier said than done in the business world and take time to nurture.
→ Explore more: What Sets High-Performing Teams Apart from the Rest
Sustained engagement isn’t built through isolated feedback on annual reviews – it’s powered by frequent, meaningful recognition. Deloitte recently found that companies that regularly celebrate achievement have 31% lower voluntary turnover than those that don’t. So, how do top teams approach achievement to not only make it regular but also tie it to what you’re trying to achieve?
In Ben Hunt-Davis’s Olympic-winning team, the crew created an Evidence Wall: a daily visual record of every action, behaviour and small win that made the boat go faster. They did this as a team and recorded what changes to their performance (tweaks they made to what they were doing, be it technique, fitness, teamwork, training) were making on their results (the outputs of timings they achieved, strength and speed increases). It built belief. It made progress visible. And it reminded the crew that every small improvement mattered.
In business, the same principle applies. Recognising progress in your performance – not just results – fuels energy and belonging. We advise our clients to build an Evidence Wall of their own (we use this ourselves every Thursday at 9am too!… because it works!). Doing so with a weekly regularity can help develop a drumbeat where your team get curious about their performance in service of your goal. It helps every person think “What could I be doing differently/better in my role to help hit our Gold Medal goal?”
Make recognition a rhythm, not an afterthought. When progress is visible and routinised, motivation becomes self-sustaining.
→ See more: Don’t Wait to Celebrate the Result. Teams gain energy from celebrating the milestones along the way.
In fast-moving organisations, the sheer volume of priorities can overwhelm even the most motivated teams. With change fatigue and information overload now a common reality, simplicity becomes the ultimate act of focus.
In complex organisations, engagement can often falter under the weight of too many priorities. Ben Hunt-Davis’s crew learned to ask one vital question before every decision:
It’s a principle leaders can use daily. Strip out the noise, focus on the few priorities that make the biggest difference, and give people the space to execute brilliantly.
We worked with one client who simplified their objectives from 173 KPIs to just five key performance measures. Within six months, their speed of execution increased by 20%.
Simplicity isn’t about lowering ambition – it’s about sharpening focus. The clearer the direction and what to focus on, the better and faster the crew can row as a unit.
→ Discover how focus drives performance: How to Build a High-Performing Team That Actually Delivers Results
The lessons from Ben’s Olympic journey go beyond sport. In 1998, his crew were ranked seventh in the world – hardly medal contenders. Two years later, they were Olympic champions.
The difference wasn’t talent; it was discipline, clarity and mindset. They stopped asking, “How do we win?” and started asking, “Will it make the boat go faster?”
Every training session, every conversation, every decision was tested against that question. It forced brutal honesty, mutual trust and shared accountability. (A watertight case study of high performance in teams – the 3M’s we explained earlier, in action!)
They weren’t just rowing harder – they were rowing together.
That’s what engagement really looks like in business: when everyone, from boardroom to front line, takes ownership of performance and moves in sync towards a shared Gold Medal ambition.
As a final thought, in 2026, the most successful organisations will be those that treat engagement not as a campaign, but as a leadership discipline.
When leaders bring clarity, ownership and celebration into daily work, they don’t just motivate people – they create belief. And belief drives performance.
Because when everyone is focused, curious about and owning what truly makes the boat go faster, that’s when extraordinary results begin.
Get in touch with us
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, we help ambitious leaders align and engage their people to deliver lasting performance.
If you’d like to explore how to turn engagement into action, speak to us about our solutions in the Strategic Goal-setting, Leadership and High-Performing Teams spaces. We’d be delighted to pick up with you about how we might be able to support.
