There’s a peculiar form of corporate delusion that bothers me lately. It surfaces whenever someone with authority but limited imagination utters “engagement” as though it’s a magical incantation. You’ve likely witnessed this phenomenon yourself.

I once led a team at a major professional services firm for a project called ‘Engage’. We were creating templates for town and district council websites modelled on Gov.uk, but with what our sponsors kept calling “more engagement.”

The sponsoring partner had very specific ideas about what this meant: before any resident could report a missed bin collection, they’d be required to endure a short video on how seriously the local council took recycling.

That’s not engagement. That’s forced attention-grabbing, and there’s a critical difference.

The engagement misconception

The word “engagement” has become so thoroughly bastardised in corporate environments that it’s nearly lost all meaning. It’s thrown around as shorthand for “make people pay attention to us” without thinking why people would want to pay attention in the first place.

I’ve had four decades of learning how to genuinely engage, as a reporter writing for local newspapers, as a radio broadcaster, as a content designer on digital transformation projects and certainly also during my 15+ years as an EA and office manager.

When LinkedIn influencers advise you to “increase engagement” by using eye-catching images, bolded text, and ending every post with a question mark, they’re not talking about genuine engagement. They describe techniques to game an algorithm, temporary hacks to generate superficial interactions that rarely translate into meaningful professional relationships.

True engagement isn’t about trapping attention. It’s about building reciprocal relationships where both parties derive genuine value.

Engagement through the management support lens

As management support professionals, we understand real engagement better than most, because we practise it daily in ways executives often fail to recognise.

Think about how you manage your executive’s relationships. You don’t start with formatting tricks or attention-grabbing gimmicks. You begin by understanding what each stakeholder needs, what they value, and what would constitute a fair exchange.

When I worked for a particularly demanding senior executive, I observed how differently we approached stakeholder relationships. He would ask team members to work overnight, miss their child’s school performance or drop everything for an urgent client request without recognising the relationship damage he was causing.

He didn’t understand what every seasoned management support professional instinctively knows: you need to build up credit.

The expression we use is “I owe you one”. Those four words acknowledge that relationships require balance. That’s real engagement.

The engagement bank account

I find it helpful to think of engagement as a bank account. Every time you ask someone for something (their time, attention, effort or goodwill) you’re making a withdrawal. Every time you offer something of value without asking for anything in return, you’re making a deposit.

The most effective management support professionals maintain positive balances in dozens of these relationship accounts across their organisations.

Consider how you approach IT when you need something urgently fixed. The management support professional who has previously taken time to understand IT’s challenges, who has expressed genuine appreciation for their work and who has perhaps brought them into relevant conversations early (rather than as an afterthought) will get a very different response than the one who only appears when something is broken.

That’s not manipulation; it’s relationship literacy.

The difference between manipulation and genuine engagement

There’s an important distinction between manipulative techniques dressed up as “engagement strategies” and genuine relationship building.

When I edited a weekly current affairs magazine show on Dutch national radio, we had to engage listeners with each item in roughly three minutes. The pressure to grab attention was immense. But we quickly learned that real engagement came from being terrific listeners and having genuine interest in our topics and interviewees.

True engagement came from respecting the intelligence of our audience and offering genuine value, whether unexpected insights, relevant information or authentic human stories.

The same principle applies in every professional context. People engage when they receive authentic value, not when you manipulate them into temporary attention.

Content design: engagement with purpose

In content design, engagement is not an abstract concept or vanity metric. We focus on serving user needs: helping people apply for benefits, report a crime, seek a government grant or find reliable health advice.

The engagement that matters isn’t measured in likes or comments but in whether people can complete the task they came to accomplish. Did they find what they needed? Could they understand it? Did it help them solve their problem?

This purpose-driven approach to engagement offers valuable lessons for management support professionals. The question isn’t “How can I get people to pay attention to me?” but “How can I genuinely help the people I’m trying to reach?”

Building genuine engagement as a management support professional

So what does genuine engagement look like for those of us in management support roles?

First, it means understanding that stakeholder mapping isn’t just a theoretical exercise. It’s about identifying the human beings who affect or are affected by your work, and understanding what they genuinely need.

Whenever I managed complex projects, I didn’t start with a communication plan. I started by having coffee with key stakeholders to understand their concerns, priorities and communication preferences. That initial investment paid extraordinary dividends when inevitable challenges arose.

Second, it means recognising that engagement isn’t just downward or upward, it’s omnidirectional. The security guard who knows building access procedures, the facilities team who control meeting room bookings, the finance assistant who processes expense claims: these relationships are just as crucial as those with senior leadership.

I once worked with an EA who kept a small notebook documenting personal details about everyone she interacted with, from birthdays, children’s names and hobbies to dietary preferences. Not to manipulate, but to remember that she was dealing with human beings, not just functional roles. My current flatmate is the same. He knows those details off the top of his head for everyone he deals with – and it’s awesome.

Third, it means having the courage to engage directly with difficult topics rather than avoiding them. The most valuable engagement often begins with a question nobody else is willing to ask.

When an executive I supported struggled to implement a new workflow system, I noticed that people were working around it rather than addressing the fundamental flaws. The breakthrough came when I facilitated a session where team members could safely express what wasn’t working without fear of judgment.

Beyond the engagement illusion

The most dangerous engagement illusion is that it’s something you do to people rather than with them. That it’s about clever techniques rather than genuine value exchange. That it can be reduced to a social media strategy or communication plan.

Management support professionals who understand true engagement know better. They recognise that momentary attention is worthless compared to enduring trust. Genuine connections outperform algorithmic tricks. Relationship literacy is perhaps the most valuable skill in their professional arsenal.

Our workplaces become increasingly fragmented, physically through hybrid arrangements and functionally through technology adoption. This ability to create genuine engagement across boundaries becomes even more valuable.

The next time someone suggests you need to “increase engagement” by using more images, bold textor question marks, remember that you already understand engagement at a far deeper level than they do. You practice it every day in the complex human systems you navigate.

You don’t need gimmicks. You need to continue doing what the best management support professionals have always done, building genuine relationships based on mutual value, authentic connection and balanced exchanges.

That’s not just engagement. That’s mastery.