Pretty much by definition, your organization’s strategic plan must include a set of clearly defined objectives—objectives that have been prioritized, operationalized, quantified, and cascaded down from the enterprise level to all operating units. Action plans to meet those objectives are drawn up at every level, and performance against those plans is measured and evaluated.

While the process varies from one organization to another, you can’t manage an organization of any size and complexity without following the basic steps: define your goals, decide on a plan to meet those goals, measure your progress, and adjust accordingly.

So here’s a question: is increased employee engagement a high priority component of your strategic plan? At least in my experience, in many organizations the answer to that question is “No,” despite the fact that the research on this subject has consistently shown that high engagement correlates positively with a wide array of key metrics, including revenue, profitability, quality, customer satisfaction, and many others.

Frankly, I don’t get it.

To me it seems pretty straightforward. Highly engaged employees outperform less engaged employees. Organizations with higher percentages of engaged employees outperform organizations with fewer engaged employees. So if you want to outperform your competition, it follows that you should do whatever you can to build a highly engaged workforce. That’s not all you need to do, of course, but it seems obvious that it’s definitely one of the key things you need to do.

Which means you need to treat engagement like all the other components of your strategic plan. You need to set engagement targets at every level, develop action plans to hit those targets, measure performance in a systematic way, and hold managers at every level accountable for the results they deliver.

If your organization is already doing all that, great. If it’s not already happening—and you’re not yet at the level where you can make it happen across the entire organization—let me repeat something I said in an earlier posting: “You are the CEO of your own organization.” While a number of things need to occur at the enterprise level around planning and execution in order to build a truly engaged enterprise, it’s also true that engagement is very much a local phenomenon. It needs to be built day in and day out, at the small unit level, by an organization’s managers and supervisors and team leaders. Which means that even if you’re leading a small unit within a larger enterprise, you can—and should—create and implement your own engagement strategy.

After all, if not you, who?