You’ve probably heard the term, “rules of engagement” before. It is the name of a television situational comedy and was also the title of a movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Before that, it was the genesis of the armed forces acronym ‘ROE’. For those not having served, rules of engagement were defined as ‘appropriate actions for military personnel in the course of their duties’. This is what I’d like to do for you: spell out the rules of engagement for leaders in the course of their duties.

I concluded my last blog with the idea that your interactions will be key going forward, not your knowledge, and that your challenge in leading will be keeping 75 percent of your key staff intact through reengaging them (and perhaps yourselves). Let’s face it, engagement matters—how you can engage employees and how they can engage themselves. A perfect storm for leadership is coming. It is engage or else. Let me tell you how.

In most circles, employees’ engagement is defined in emotional terms; how they feel about their boss, the amount of trust and confidence they have in their leader, a reflection of their emotional attachment to their work. There are often measures of the probability employees will remain with the organization, the likelihood that they will make positive statements about their employer, and sometimes even tracking the level of discretionary effort they might expend in their work. What drives engagement then?

1. Feedback and dialogue with the boss
2. The quality of working relationships
3. The perceptions that leaders live the organization’s values, not just recite them.

Let’s stop right here for a moment. There is a positive correlation, a known connection, between employee engagement— emotional attachment to our work—and bottom line results. It is proven. It is fact. I am not going to hit you with a shotgun blast of data to prove the connection. Employee engagement is highly correlated with effective leadership, which tends to be associated with productivity and profitability. If you didn’t believe that employees who care do better than those who don’t care, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

What are the ‘rules’ then? I am going to increase your odds of riding out the perfect storm of leadership that is just over the horizon, of coming out the other side intact and healthy. The rules are simple, but never easy:

1. Ask what your people want you to know, but have been reluctant to say to you
2. Seek the best of their suggestions on what they want you to do to engage them
3. Target your efforts to retain the core of your team, not the high-problem nor even the high-potential fringe
4. Master a behavioral model for developing communications intelligence
5. Learn to be present with others, to rescue dying empathy
6. Adopt a protocol for leading in the moment and finding the energy to do it