My kid came home with a reading fluency assignment.
The exercise was simple. Read a passage. Then read it again, faster. Then again. The goal was fluency, the ability to move through text with ease and speed and comprehension all happening at once. The research behind it is solid: repeated practice at the right level builds automaticity, and automaticity frees up cognitive space for deeper understanding.
I sat with my kid while they worked through it. When they finished, I asked one of the reflection questions the teacher had included with the assignment.
What choices did you make in the way you read the excerpt?
There was a pause. And then the answer.
I did not make any choices. I just read it.
They were not complaining. They were reporting a fact about their own experience. The work had happened, but they had not been in it. They were executing a process, not engaging with it. The passage had moved through them without landing anywhere.
The Same Answer Lives in Most Organizations.
I thought about that for a long time.
Because I have watched the same thing happen in organizations for decades. Employees who are technically present, technically performing, technically completing the work. And who would give the same honest answer if someone asked the right question: I did not make any choices. I just did it.
We call this a motivation problem, or an attitude problem, or a culture problem. And sometimes it is. But what my kid's homework made me think about is that we have designed a lot of work the same way that assignment was designed: for compliance, not for choice. For execution, not for investment. For completion, not for meaning.
When people do not make choices in their work, they
are not engaged in their work. They are processing it.
The Question That Changes Everything.
The fix is not a pep talk. It is not a values poster or an engagement survey. It is the redesign of work itself to include things that require genuine decision-making, judgment, and ownership. It is the difference between asking someone to complete a task and asking someone to solve a problem. Between giving someone a process and giving someone a goal.
The research on engagement is consistent: people are most motivated when they have autonomy, when their work has visible impact, and when they have real opportunity to grow. None of those things are present in work that is purely procedural.
The teacher's question was the most important part of that assignment. Not the reading. Not the repetition. The question that asked a child to look at their own experience and say honestly what was happening inside it.
Most organizations never ask that question. And so, the answer never surfaces.
Are Your People in It?
My kid's fluency did improve. The method works for what it was designed for. But engagement is not fluency. It is not about moving through the material faster. It is about being present inside it.
The question for every leader is not whether your people are completing the work.
It is whether they are in it.
This is human work.
Reflection
- If you asked your team what choices they made in their work this week, what would they say?
- Where have you designed for compliance rather than choice?
- And what is one thing you could change this month to put genuine decision-making back into the work?
Add comment
Comments