Aram DiGennaro: The 3 Steps to Creating an Effective and Engaged Team

In this solo episode, Aram DiGennaro makes the case that getting your people to perform at their best is the holy grail of management — and explains why most companies are falling far short. With only 15–25% of employees actively engaged and roughly 60% quietly quitting, the opportunity (and urgency) for better leadership has never been greater.
 
Aram challenges the dominant "machine" model of business efficiency and offers a compelling third way: treating your business as both a well-oiled machine and a living ecosystem simultaneously. He then delivers three concrete, actionable areas to focus on this week — mastering your meetings, your emotions, and your meaning-making — to begin moving your team toward its highest potential.
 
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RESOURCES
 
Coherent Business Project
https://coherentbusinessproject.com/
For leaders, thinkers, and builders who believe business can be more than just efficient — it can be whole, human, and meaningful. Post-reductionist answers to real-world problems.
 
Protentional
https://protentional.com
Protentional guides leaders to integrate compelling priorities into coherent strategy.
 
Aram's LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aram-digennaro/
 
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KEY TOPICS
 
* Employee engagement and the cost of disengagement
* The "business as machine" model and its limitations
* Business as ecosystem: the squishy family-green model
* The Third Way: machine and ecosystem as complementary opposites
* Mastering meetings as intentional stage productions
* Emotional intelligence and leading from your emotional center
* Meaning-making and the power of storytelling in leadership
* Individual career conversations as a retention and motivation tool
 
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
 
* Engagement Has a Bottom Line: Companies with engaged employees see 20–25% higher profits and 40% lower absenteeism. Engagement isn't just nice to have — it's your competitive edge.
 
* The Third Way: Don't choose between running a tight machine and cultivating a thriving ecosystem. The top 5% of businesses are in the top 80th percentile of both — and learn to link them together.
 
* Meetings as Masterpieces: Every management or departmental meeting should be approached with intentionality: recognize employees, differentiate agenda modes (brainstorming vs. problem-solving vs. reporting), and design an emotional arc with tension and resolution.
 
* Lead from Your Emotional Center: Rather than performing energy or withdrawing, stay grounded in who you are. Tune into the emotional resonance of the room — that agitation or confusion you're feeling may actually belong to someone else.
 
* Tell the Story 10x More Than You Think: Leaders are narrative beings. Tell your company's origin story, its present struggles, and its future vision — repeatedly. Story pulls people in where logic alone cannot.
 
* Make Every Employee the Hero: Once or twice a year, sit down with employees — ideally two layers down — not to evaluate, but to listen: Where are you going? How can we help? Your job is to help them become the hero of their own story at your company.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Once a year or twice a year, sit down with each of your employees and get either your direct reports or ideally people two layers down from you is where this is most effective. And just ask them to help you understand where they are going. So I've been promising you a video on how you can get your team to function at its highest potential. And at first blush, the situation is not all that great. You've seen the statistics. Maybe 15 to 20% of your people, 25% tops, are actively engaged at work. You've got about 60% of the people in a typical company who are basically quiet, quitting. They're disengaged. They're just going through the motion. And you have 15 or 20% who are actively working against you. That's not good. So there's no doubt that the holy grail of management is getting people who are performing at their best. So in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to tell you why this is so hard, why it matters, and what you can do this week to work towards your goal of having all of your employees performing at their best. So first of all, why does this matter? I'll give you three reasons. The first, we've already alluded to, and is simply that having engaged employees is the only way that your company is going to win. Companies that have engaged employees see 20 to 25% higher profits, 40% lower absenteeism. And you could go on and on with statistics, but I don't think it requires a lot of research to understand how having people who want to be doing what they're doing and want to do a good job is going to have your company performing better. Number two, it's the right thing to do. Look, people give your company many, many hours, the best hours of their days, of the best years of their life. The right thing to do is to make that a good experience. It doesn't mean that it's easy, that it's going to be easy for them. It doesn't mean that it's going to be fun all the time, but there should be a sense that when we show up and put in our best effort, we are connected to something valuable and we sense that connection and we want to put in more effort. There's a demand for labor. There's a demand for doing meaningful work, just as there is a demand for the outputs of that work and you want to tap into that and give people that experience. Number three, you work here too. And you don't want to work in a place where people are conspiring against you, where people are going through the motions, where people can't wait for five o'clock so that they can go and do something that actually brings some value to their life. You want to be with people who want just as much as you are to push through, to work long hours if necessary, in order to get done what needs to get done, or to quit early and go to some other part of life so that you can come back energized to do something else that rewards you. And a big part of what we're doing here is trying to help everybody create companies and create workplaces that they want to spend time in, so that it's not just something that we do for money and then we leave, but it's something that we actively want to stay engaged in through our whole working life. That's the legacy that we want to leave. So it sounds good. Why is it so hard? Well, I think the biggest thing here is that we have been bewitched by the vision of the business as a machine. And it makes sense, especially the first and second industrial revolutions were very focused on kind of these mechanical aspects of management. And we created this idea that in order to have a good business, it has to run like a well-oiled machine. There can be no excess, there can be no wasted energy. Everything has to be operating at the highest levels of efficiency in order to compete in an economic landscape or an economic universe that is very mechanical, that is very competitive. Now, there are a lot of things that are great about this perspective, but it's only one piece. And I think sometimes we feel guilty if we don't keep this front and center, and if we don't dial in, if we don't maximize all of the optimizations that we can to see our business functioning like a well-oiled machine. I'll come back to how we tap into this, but I want us to see how completely we've been captured by this model. Now, in recent years, there's a different model that's come to the fore, and that's kind of the squishy family green ecosystem model, where we want everybody perhaps to be functioning at their best, and we want people to feel safe, to feel productive, to have all the time off that they want. And this model of business as an ecosystem or business as a family has something to say for it as well. But when you set it against the model of the business as a machine, you see that neither of these are complete in themselves. And you start to wonder, well, is there a third way? Yes, there is a third way. Your business is a well-oiled machine, and your business is an ecosystem. And your excellence in running a business comes from being able to see those as complementary opposites and strengthen both of them at the same time. It's not maximizing one or maximizing the other, but it's maximizing the interporosity or the interaction between these two models. I like to think that you should be in the top 5 or 10% of businesses in your sector. How do you do that? Well, you're not going to get it just by maximizing the machine or just by maximizing people's happiness and fulfillment. Rather, you'll get it just by being maybe in the top fifth, above 80% in both of them, and learning to link them together. That is the third way. So, in order to be in the top 5%, be in the top 80% of both the well-oil machine and running the ecosystem. So that's how to think about it. But are there some quick wins that you can get this week? Absolutely. I want you to think of three aspects of running a business that you need to master. Again, you don't need to be perfect at this, but you need to be having a solid B plus A minus rating in order to get the leverage that you need. You need to master your meetings, master your emotions, and master your meeting making. Master your meetings. Listen, I want you to think of every management meeting or every departmental meeting as a stage production. It's something that you approach with intentionality. You don't just show up and say, well, what should we talk about today? And you're there for 60 minutes or 90 minutes and everybody leaves. Obviously, you don't run meetings that way. Put some planning and some intentionality into it. This is a perfect time to recognize employees. That's one of the main ways that we drive engagement is by recognizing the work that people put in and the good things that they accomplish. This is a time to have differentiated agenda so we know when we are brainstorming, when we're prioritizing, when we're problem solving, when we're reporting. We're focusing our time on the future as much as possible, not on the past. And we have a clear sense as we move through the meeting that there's an emotional arc. There are tensions that are created, and there are tensions that resolve. So if you think of every meeting as a kind of masterpiece, then you can put together the meetings that you need that will make this happen. Number two, master your emotions. And if you're somebody like me, for whom the people side of things does not come naturally, then this is a way that you can really quickly start to make some progress. It's far more than you thought was possible. One easy thing to do is learn to speak from your emotional center. So instead of getting over-caffeinated and just speaking with a lot of energy, or instead of retiring and stepping back, try to stay in touch with where you are, with who you are, and speak from that, engage from that. Don't get pulled into these extraneous emotions and energies that make it hard for people to relate to you. Another thing that you can do is to tap into the emotional resonance of other people. Do you know that when you're talking to someone and you start to feel an emotion, a lot of times that emotion is actually coming from the other person? Humans are really good at empathy, mirror neurons and all of that. So if you walk into a meeting and suddenly you start to feel agitated or you start to feel depressed, or you start to feel sort of confused, just stop for a sec and ask yourself, is there someone else in this room that might be feeling that? And can I address this to get this gathering back on track? Another thing that you can do, and this is great even if you're just a beginner and like me, I'm not very good at this, is so what can I do to start getting in touch with how emotions work in relationships? Well, you can do a quick check-in. You can do it at the beginning of each meeting. Great idea. At the beginning of a call, after a call, during a call. Just try to see how your body feels. See if there's any one sensation or emotion that kind of bubbles to the top. And then, this is really important, try to locate that emotion somewhere in your body. Like right now, I feel there's some tension in my back. Now, this could be because I was playing soccer last night, but just settling into that, just getting in touch with where that sensation or emotion is can help me to be more in touch with where I am and speak more from my emotional center. The third thing you need to master is making meaning. This is obviously something I'm really passionate about here at the Coherent Business Project, but I think it's something that every business leader needs to take seriously, especially in 2026. You need to become a master storyteller. You need to get good at telling those stories. And this is key, you need to tell them about 10 times as often as you think you should. Tell your story, tell the company's story, tell about its beginnings, about its past, and most of all, talk about your company's future. These stories that are woven over and over have an incredible energy in pulling people in because we are narrative beings. We make sense of things, not just with logic, but with the arc of story that connects us to what we are putting our energy into. You also need to be a master storyteller with the story of the individual. And this involves a lot more listening than talking. But if you haven't done this one trick, I encourage you to start immediately. Once a year or twice a year, sit down with each of your employees, either your direct reports or ideally people two layers down from you is where this is most effective. And just ask them to help you understand where they are going. This is not an evaluation. It's not giving advice. It's not laying down how they need to improve their performance. It's asking them to share with you what is going well. How can the company improve? What are your long-term goals? How can we help you move toward those goals? And you, as a manager, have a lot of insight that then you can feed back in. Again, your primary task is listening, but you're also giving direction on how this individual can become the hero of their own story at your company. And if you can do that, the power, the energy that you unleash will be incredible. So those are just some quick things that I wanted to share in a few minutes so that you can this week start moving your team to a higher level of performance. This is, of course, a lifelong quest. Many books have been written and will be written, and I'm not trying to replace those, but I want you to understand the framework for how this is important and how you can start moving forward. Until next time, stay coherent.