My new book Ingaging Leadership: A new approach to leading that builds excellence and organizational success is now available on Amazon.com, people are reading and reviewing it. And several people have emailed me to ask the same question . . .

Why did you call your book Ingaged Leadership instead of Engaged Leadership?

That’s a fair question. The short answer (before I give you a longer one) is that if you visit an online or brick-and-mortar bookseller, you will find a lot of books about engagement. Some of them are very good books, but I wanted to establish from the cover onward that my book is about something different. What is the difference?

The first difference is that the word ingagement cannot be found in dictionaries, but the word engagement can. If you look it up, you will find definitions like these:

• A commitment to be somewhere for a designated period of time.
• A formal agreement to get married.
• A level of belief in a process.

Of those three definitions, the third – belief in a process – comes closest to what I mean when I refer to ingagement. Yet ingagement is something bigger. The first difference is that the I stands for Involvement, because ingagement is a process that involves people in making decisions and developing new ideas. By taking part in that process, they become both engaged and ingaged, and believe in the processes that you lead.

Taking “I” to New Heights

In addition to involvement, the letter I in my book about ingagement embodies additional concepts like these:

• Ideas, which are the bedrock of organizational success and growth.

• “I,” as a marker of personal involvement in processes, as in “I brought suggestions to the table, I was heard, and I am seeing my ideas take life.

• Inspiration, which explains itself.

• Insight, which is something people develop when they work through ingaged processes and help them come to life.

• Inquiry, which is something that people get excited about when they understand that their ideas are heard and welcomed.

• Intrepid, which is what people become when they are inspired to tackle new challenges.

• Interactive, because people in ingaged organizations deal more enthusiastically with each other, with customers, with clients, and with all company stakeholders.

• Irrepressible, which describes the mood of enthusiasm that takes hold in ingaged organizations.

In Summary . . .

That is why my book is about ingagement rather than engagement. Incidentally, I believe in the concept so strongly that I named my company Ingage Consulting.  It is not a concept that I take lightly. I strive to live it every day. If you would like to achieve results that exceed all expectations, I encourage you to try ingaged leadership too.