Why the five drivers of engagement can’t work without building the capacity to solve problems
Recent research from Korn Ferry has identified five key drivers of employee engagement that work across generations, geographies, and industries: security and confidence in leadership, caring and human-centric culture, growth opportunities, fulfilling work, and good managers. Their findings are compelling because employees who feel valued and supported are among the strongest assets of any organisation. However, these drivers depend fundamentally on the organisation’s systemic ability to solve complex problems through innovation capability, making this the critical underlying system for sustained engagement.
But here’s what the research misses: none of these drivers can be sustained without the organisational capability to solve complex problems systematically. Building genuine innovation capability and culture empowers employees and instils confidence in leadership, making engagement more meaningful.
This isn’t speculation. It’s what I’ve observed working with Fortune 500 companies and governments around the world on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. Organisations that fail to build genuine innovation capability—the systematic ability to identify, develop, and deliver solutions that create meaningful value—inevitably struggle with employee engagement, regardless of how many wellness programs or development initiatives they launch.
The System Problem
Iceland’s President Halla Tomasdottir recently delivered a provocative message at London Business School: “The purpose of business is to solve problems, but our current systems prevent us from doing so effectively.” She challenged leaders to work ON the system, not just IN it—to redesign the fundamental architecture of how organisations operate rather than optimising symptoms.
I would extend her thesis: “If business exists to solve problems, innovation capability IS the system that needs redesigning.”
Currently, 84% of executives consider innovation critical, while only 6% are satisfied with the results. This isn’t a knowledge gap—it’s a systemic failure. Organisations remain trapped in what’s commonly known as “innovation theatre”—labs, buzzwords, hackathons—without addressing the cultural and leadership foundations required for genuine problem-solving capability.
You can’t solve Tomasdottir’s “problems of people and planet” without first solving how organisations systematically solve problems. That’s the ultimate system redesign. And critically, it’s also the foundation that makes the five drivers of employee engagement actually work.
Driver 1: Security and Confidence in Leadership — Through Innovation-focussed Leadership
Korn Ferry’s research reveals that employees seek security above all else—job security, financial security, and confidence in leadership they can trust. The keys, they note, are transparency, regular communication, and demonstrating that layoffs aren’t the first line of defence.
But here’s the more profound truth: sustainable security comes from organisational resilience, which emerges from innovation capability. Without developing this systemic capacity, efforts to build trust and confidence in leadership remain superficial and short-lived.
Leaders who can genuinely create security are those who can lead FOR innovation—who build organisations capable of adapting, evolving, and developing new value streams before existing ones deteriorate. This isn’t about promising innovation theatre; it’s about demonstrating the capability to shape the future rather than merely reacting to it.
When I work with executive teams, the breakthrough comes when they recognize that their primary job isn’t managing today’s operations more efficiently—it’s creating the conditions where their organisations can systematically identify and solve emerging problems. This shift makes leaders feel strategic and purposeful, aligning their actions with long-term success.
Research from McKinsey shows that companies with strong middle-management engagement in innovation initiatives are 38% more likely to achieve successful innovation outcomes. But this only happens when senior leaders demonstrate they’re serious about building innovation capability. When they allocate meaningful resources to experimentation, protect time for innovation even under pressure, and recognise learning from failure.
That’s the kind of leadership that creates genuine security. Employees don’t just want reassurance that their current job is safe—they want confidence that their organisation can navigate whatever disruption comes next.
Driver 2: Caring and Human-Centric Culture — Through Psychological Safety and Customer Focus
Korn Ferry emphasises that organisations demonstrating genuine care for their people consistently see stronger engagement. But care without capability is ultimately hollow. The most caring thing leaders can do is create environments where people can do genuinely meaningful work—and that requires psychological safety specifically designed for innovation.
Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard quantifies that teams with high psychological safety are 67% more innovative. But psychological safety isn’t just about feeling comfortable—it’s about creating conditions where people can take the calculated risks required to solve complex problems without fear that failure will damage their careers.
Here’s where the human-centric culture goes deeper: organisations genuinely focused on innovation must extend that empathy and psychological safety beyond internal operations to their customer relationships. The most valuable problems to solve—the ones that create differentiated competitive advantage—emerge from deep customer understanding.
When organisations build cultures that enable employees to engage authentically with customers, to understand not just what they’re asking for but what problems they’re actually trying to solve, what’s causing them pain, they create the foundation for differentiated innovation. This is the middle ground between incremental improvements and radical moonshots—the space where sustainable competitive advantage is built through systematic customer-focused problem-solving.
Research from Accenture shows that companies with balanced innovation portfolios achieve 3.5 times greater shareholder returns than their industry peers. But you can’t build that balanced portfolio without a culture that combines psychological safety internally with genuine curiosity about customer problems externally.
Driver 3: Growth Opportunities — Through Problem-Solving Capability
The Korn Ferry research shows that the most engaged employees report being offered good opportunities for learning and development. But here’s the challenge: many organisations struggle to provide meaningful growth opportunities, especially during leaner times.
The solution isn’t more training programs—it’s building organisational capability to solve increasingly complex problems, which naturally creates growth opportunities for everyone involved.
When I work with organisations, I often use a methodology where leaders assemble small teams to solve genuine business problems in controlled, low-risk environments. The primary focus isn’t just solving the problems (though that’s valuable)—it’s developing people’s capability to tackle complexity, navigate ambiguity, and collaborate across functions.
This approach embodies Korn Ferry’s view of career lattices rather than career ladders. When employees can move horizontally to gain diverse problem-solving experience—working on operational challenges, customer experience issues, and process improvements—they develop the capabilities that make them valuable regardless of specific job titles or hierarchies.
Individual growth comes from organisational growth, and organisational growth comes from the systematic capability to identify and solve problems that create value. This isn’t about occasional innovation challenges—it’s about embedding problem-solving capability throughout the organisation so that growth opportunities emerge naturally and continuously.
Research shows that organisations with strong innovation cultures see 3.4 times greater total returns to shareholders. But critically, they also create more opportunities for employee development because they’re constantly engaging with new challenges that require people to stretch and learn.
Driver 4: Fulfilling Work — Through Genuine Impact
Korn Ferry notes that people want to feel fulfilled by their work, but fulfilment means different things to different people. There’s one universal source of fulfilment that transcends individual differences: knowing you’ve made a genuine impact!
There’s nothing more fulfilling than solving a problem that matters—that shifts the needle for customers, improves operations meaningfully, or enables your organisation to serve its purpose more effectively. This is why innovation capability is so crucial to employee engagement: it gives people the opportunity to do work that genuinely makes a difference.
But here’s the critical distinction I make with every executive team I advise: “innovation is not an activity but an effect.” It’s a designation that customers and markets bestow when they experience your solutions as sufficiently valuable or transformative. No internal committee can declare “we’ve innovated”—that judgment belongs exclusively to those you serve.
When organisations understand this distinction—when they focus not on “doing innovation” but on creating the conditions for ideas of genuine impact to emerge, be refined, and be delivered—they lay the foundation for deeply fulfilling work.
One pharmaceutical executive I advised built a remarkable innovation pipeline by changing the first five minutes of every leadership meeting to recognise learning from failure. Within months, teams were taking calculated risks to solve problems that had persisted for years. The sense of fulfilment wasn’t from completing assigned tasks—it was from knowing they were genuinely shaping the future of patient care.
This is what Tomasdottir means by solving the problems of people and planet. But you can’t do that without building the organisational capability to identify what problems genuinely matter and the courage to tackle them systematically.
Driver 5: Good Managers — Through Innovation Enablement
Korn Ferry’s data reveals that 80% of employees would stay in a job they hated if they had a great manager. This underscores just how critical effective management is to engagement.
But here’s what most organisations miss: “the most important capability for managers today isn’t operational oversight—it’s innovation enablement.” Specifically, middle managers must become what I call the “DRIVE” layer in my ODC Framework—the critical translators who convert executive innovation aspirations into daily operational reality.
Middle managers operate at the perfect intersection to leverage what I call Differentiated Innovation. They understand both strategic priorities and operational realities, directly influence the most significant portion of the workforce, and can facilitate the cross-functional collaboration required for customer-focused problem-solving.
Yet most organisations struggle here because they’ve never resolved the fundamental tension between managing today and shaping tomorrow. They expect middle managers to maintain operational excellence while simultaneously enabling teams to experiment, take risks, and challenge existing approaches.
The solution isn’t choosing between today and tomorrow—it’s building the systematic capability to do both. This requires:
· Redefining the middle management role from operational oversight to innovation enablement, where success includes both delivery and development of problem-solving capability.
· Creating psychological safety specifically designed for middle managers—protection from above to take calculated risks and trust from below to empower experimentation.
· Providing innovation frameworks tailored to the unique challenges middle managers face in balancing daily operations with transformation initiatives.
· Developing metrics that measure both activity and outcomes, recognising managers for enabling innovation, not just maintaining stability.
Research from MIT shows that middle managers play a crucial role in connecting overall organisational values with day-to-day employee experiences. When these managers are equipped to enable innovation—when they can create space for problem-solving, remove barriers, and celebrate learning—they become the most powerful driver of both engagement and organisational capability.
Innovation Capability: The Red Thread
What connects all five engagement drivers is this: “organisations cannot sustain security, demonstrate care, provide growth, enable fulfilment, or develop great managers without the systematic capability to solve complex problems.”
Innovation capability—the ability to identify problems that matter, develop solutions that create value, and deliver them effectively—is the underlying system that makes everything else possible. It’s the red thread that connects:
· Security through organisational resilience and adaptability
· Care through psychological safety and customer-centricity
· Growth through exposure to increasingly complex challenges
· Fulfilment through genuine impact on customers and mission
· Management through enablement rather than control
This is what Tomasdottir means by working ON the system rather than IN it. The system that needs redesigning isn’t just capitalism or governance structures—it’s how organisations build the capability to solve the problems of people and planet systematically.
Beyond Theatre to Human-Centred Transformation
The sobering reality is that most organisations are nowhere near this level of systematic capability. They’re stuck in innovation theatre—displaying the right posters, using correct terminology, perhaps establishing innovation labs—without addressing the fundamental conditions required for genuine problem-solving to flourish.
The shift requires moving:
· From innovation as activity to innovation as effect — recognising that customers and society decide what’s innovative, not internal committees
· From incremental/moonshot polarisation to differentiated innovation — building capability in the strategic middle ground where sustainable advantage is created
· From treating middle managers as barriers to activating them as multipliers — equipping them to drive innovation daily, rather than bypassing them
· From fear-based cultures to psychologically safe environments — creating conditions where appropriate risk-taking is encouraged and learning from failure is celebrated.
This isn’t just about making employees feel better about their work—though that matters. It’s about building the organisational capability required for sustainable competitive advantage in an era of unprecedented disruption.
The Engagement Imperative
Korn Ferry is absolutely right that the companies performing in the top quartile for employee engagement achieve double the growth rate of those with less engaged employees—9.7% versus 4.63%. If all Fortune 500 companies performed as well as this, they’d add $11 trillion to the global economy.
But here’s the causal chain they don’t fully articulate: “engaged employees are more likely to contribute to solving complex problems, and organisations that can solve complex problems systematically are more likely to create the conditions for genuine engagement.”
It’s a reinforcing cycle, not a linear cause-and-effect. You can’t just optimise for engagement through wellness programs and development opportunities while leaving innovation capability unaddressed. And you can’t build innovation capability without creating the psychological safety, growth opportunities, and management practices that drive engagement.
The solution is designing organisations where innovation capability and employee engagement reinforce each other—where the systematic ability to identify and solve meaningful problems creates security, demonstrates care, enables growth, provides fulfilment, and demands excellent management.
That’s the system redesign that both Tomasdottir and the employee engagement research point toward. It’s not about tweaking symptoms—it’s about rebuilding the fundamental architecture of how organisations create value.
A Call to Action
If you’re a leader struggling with employee engagement, ask yourself:
1. Can your organisation systematically identify and solve complex problems? Not occasionally, through special initiatives, but as a core capability embedded throughout operations.
2. Are your middle managers equipped to enable innovation daily? Do they have the psychological safety, resources, and authority needed to help their teams solve problems that matter?
3. Does your culture create conditions for meaningful impact? Can employees see how their problem-solving efforts translate into genuine value for customers and organisational purpose?
4. Are you working ON the system or just IN it? Are you redesigning how your organisation builds innovation capability, or just optimising existing approaches?
The answers to these questions will reveal whether you’re building genuine capability or just staging engagement theatre.
Building innovation capability isn’t quick or easy. It requires patience, courage, and the willingness to work against organisational inertia and human risk-aversion. But for organisations willing to do the difficult work of system redesign, the rewards are substantial—not just in shareholder returns, but in creating workplaces where people can do genuinely meaningful work that shapes the future.
That’s not just employee engagement. That’s organisational transformation driven by the systematic capability to solve the problems that matter most.
Cris Beswick is a strategic advisor and recognised global thought leader on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. He works with executive teams worldwide to build innovation-led organisations capable of solving complex problems and shaping the future.
References:
Korn Ferry. (2025). “5 Key Drivers of Employee Engagement.” Korn Ferry Insights.
Tomasdottir, H. (2025). Keynote address at London Business School.
Edmondson, A. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
McKinsey & Company. (2018). “Innovation in the Organization: The Role of Middle Managers.”
Accenture. (2018). “How to Unlock the Value of Your Innovation Strategy.”