Would You Let an Amateur Practice Psychology on Your Stakeholders?
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Why leaving engagement program design to untrained managers and solution providers is a hidden—and growing—enterprise risk. By Gary Rhoads
Rhoads is EEA Academic Director, Professor Emeritus, Professor of Marketing, Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University.
Engagement Is Not Harmless—It Is Behavioral Engineering
The Real Issue: A Hidden Capability Gap
What Competence Looks Like in Practice
How to Tell If Your Designers Are Ready—or a Risk
The Bottom Line: Engagement Is Too Powerful to Improvise
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Organizations routinely entrust managers and solution providers with programs that influence the behavior and emotions of customers, employees, partners, and communities—often without ensuring they have even a basic grounding in behavioral science or stakeholder systems. The consequences can range from wasted investment to reputational damage and ethical failure. Drawing on Enterprise Engagement Alliance (EEA) principles, real-world case examples, and independent research, this article explores the minimum knowledge and training required to responsibly design engagement strategies—and how executives can tell whether their managers or solution providers are equipped.
The impact of unqualified engagement practitioners and solution providers is evident in the pathetically low employee and customer engagement scores indicated by Gallup and American Customer Satisfaction Index surveys. Take this free EEA practice curriculum test to evaluate your personal level of knowledge about this strategic, systematic, and holistic approach to measurable performance and experience improvement through people.
Engagement Is Not Harmless—It Is Behavioral Engineering
Imagine placing an untrained individual in charge of providing psychological counseling. The risks would be immediate and obvious: unintended harm, ethical lapses, and potentially severe consequences for both individuals and institutions. Yet in organizations every day, managers are asked to design programs that shape how people think, feel, and behave—without any formal preparation in behavioral science, stakeholder management, or systems thinking.
Whether aimed at customers, employees, sales teams, distribution partners, or communities, these initiatives function as large-scale behavioral interventions. When thoughtfully designed, they can create alignment, trust, and sustained performance. When they are not, the consequences can be profound. The Wells Fargo sales practices scandal, in which employees created millions of unauthorized accounts under pressure from misaligned incentives, did not arise from a lack of activity—it arose from a lack of understanding. It is a powerful reminder that poorly designed engagement systems can do real damage, not only to organizations but to the people they touch.
There is a tendency to view engagement programs as benign—communications campaigns, recognition initiatives, or incentive plans that simply need better execution. But this perspective understates both their power and their risk. In reality, engagement programs are mechanisms for influencing human behavior across complex ecosystems. They shape decisions, priorities, and even ethical boundaries. When designed without a clear understanding of how stakeholders are connected, or what truly motivates them, they can create distortions that ripple across the enterprise. Short-term gains may be achieved, but often at the expense of long-term trust, culture, and performance.
Research in stakeholder engagement consistently underscores this point. Effective engagement requires structured processes for understanding stakeholder needs, aligning objectives, and continuously adapting strategies and tactics based on feedback. These are not intuitive skills. They reflect a body of knowledge that, while not overly complex, must be deliberately learned and applied.
The Real Issue: A Hidden Capability Gap 
The central question for executives is not whether their organizations are investing in engagement, but whether the people designing these efforts possess even a minimum viable level of competence. Given that the subject is taught almost nowhere in schools or professional education, demonstrated expertise is rare.
It begins with an understanding of how to create purpose alignment. Managers must be able to connect any initiative, no matter how tactical, to the broader objectives of the enterprise or team and the shared value it seeks to create for stakeholders. Without this grounding, programs tend to drift, competing for attention and resources rather than reinforcing a common direction.
Closely related is the ability to think in systems rather than silos. Effective engagement requires an appreciation for how stakeholders interact and influence one another. Employees affect customers, partners influence brand perception, communities shape the operating environment. Team members directly affect one another. Managers who have been exposed to stakeholder mapping or cross-functional initiatives tend to develop this awareness; those who have not often design programs in isolation, overlooking unintended consequences that emerge elsewhere in the system.
What Competence Looks Like in Practice
Equally important is an understanding of value exchange. Engagement is not something an organization does to people—it is something it creates with them. Customers, employees, partners and team members, participate when they perceive value, whether that value is financial, emotional, social, or developmental. Managers who have training or experience in customer experience, employee experience, or design thinking are more likely to approach program design from this perspective.
Underlying all of this is a basic grasp of human behavior. While managers are not expected to be psychologists, they do need to understand that behavior is shaped by a combination of clarity, capability, and motivation. Incentives, recognition, communication, and leadership all play roles, but they must be applied with care. The Wells Fargo example illustrates what happens when one element—in this case, financial incentives—is overemphasized without regard for broader behavioral dynamics. Engagement designers should have a grasp of all the tactics of engagement, from brand architecture, leadership coaching, and culture, to voice, communications, learning, job design, innovation, DEI, rewards and recognition, analytics, and more.
Finally, there is the discipline of measurement and continuous improvement. Engagement is not a one-time campaign but an ongoing process. Managers must be able to define what success looks like in measurable terms and to adjust their approaches based on feedback and results. Without this capability, programs become static, driven more by assumptions than by evidence.
How to Tell If Your Managers Are Ready—or a Risk
For executives seeking to assess capability, the signals are often subtle but telling. Managers who are prepared for this responsibility tend to speak in terms of alignment, stakeholders, and outcomes stated in meaningful terms. They can articulate not only what a program will do, but why it will work or the risks involved, and how it will be measured. Their experience often spans multiple functions or involves initiatives that required collaboration across boundaries.
In contrast, those who are underprepared tend to focus on tactics—campaigns, technology platforms, incentives and recognition—without connecting them to a broader system or anticipating their effects. They may be energetic and well-intentioned, but without the necessary foundation, they are effectively experimenting on stakeholders.
The Bottom Line: Engagement Is Too Powerful to Improvise
The implications are significant. Engagement is one of the most powerful levers available to organizations, precisely because it operates at the level of human behavior. But with that power comes responsibility. Organizations would never entrust financial systems, legal frameworks, or medical protocols to untrained individuals. Yet many still allow underqualified sales, marketing and human resources managers or solution providers to design systems that influence how people think, feel, and act at scale. Given the generally low state of engagement, the evidence is strong that many unqualified people are at the helm of incentive, recognition or general engagement process design. The lesson from past failures is not that engagement itself is risky—it is that uninformed engagement is risky. With even a modest foundation of knowledge and training, managers can design programs that align stakeholders, reinforce values, and drive sustainable performance. It is not rocket science. The practices are used daily in factories, laboratories, hospitals, engineering and other firms around the world. Without a holistic approach, they may unintentionally create the very problems they are trying to solve.
In the end, the question is simple: are your managers equipped to shape behavior responsibly—or are they, however well-intentioned, experimenting on your stakeholders?
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 17th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
