• Outlines four core principles and three practices that enable leaders to build strong employee commitment to change efforts

• Shows how the old change management model actually discourages engagement

• Includes new interviews and new material on encouraging engagement through everyday interactions and work design

Building engagement is crucial for every organization—Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the economy more than 300 billion dollars a year—and is particularly vital when it comes to change efforts. But the old change management paradigm actually discourages engagement. Change is strictly a top down affair. Fear is often recommended as a way to motivate—leaders are urged to “light a fire” under their employees. The result is rank-and-file cynicism, resistance and resentment.

Terms of Engagement offers a better way. Richard Axelrod first destroys six common change management myths and then shows leaders how to involve everyone in an organization—not just select committees or working groups--in designing change efforts. He offers strategies for creating connections between people at all levels and building communities within the organization enthusiastically engaged in fostering change.  Undergirding all these efforts, he insists, must be a fundamental and transparent commitment to fairness in planning, implementation and outcome.

This revised edition features many new interviews—everyone from the Vice President for Global Citizenship at Cirque de Soleil to a check out clerk at Best Buy—and three new chapters. It includes a summary of recent findings in neuroscience that support Axelrod’s change model, and advice on how you can encourage engagement through everyday conversations, staff meetings, and work design.

Organizations must change often and nimbly in today’s business climate. Every leader now faces what Axelrod calls the eternal question: “How do I engage people in the purpose of the enterprise?” Terms of Engagement has the answer.