What About Energy?
From when we are very young and have to get up in the morning to face the day, getting things done has been the daily challenge. Getting to school, learning tables, opening the shop, cooking and cleaning, essential DIY, having meetings, running the country! A daily relentless challenge we all face with limited resources of money, time, ideas and help.
And if getting things done isn’t difficult enough, we have to get them done right. We have to be at school on time, know our tables backwards, and run the country well.
But it gets worse. We have to get right things done right – morally right, the right priorities … and so on.
And then we have to get right things done right together, so we have to master social skills, emotional intelligence, trust, communication and tolerance. These all become essential capabilities.
Then we find ourselves working in teams and that changes the dynamics of the daily challenge. It now becomes the management challenge! The right people, with the right skills, in the right jobs, at the right cost, with the right ideas, in the right relationships with others, with the right attitude and facing in the right direction!
What a challenge that is, and to make it possible we create “recipes” – best practices, GAAP, King Commission rules, stock exchange rules, policy documents, management performance systems, job evaluation processes, computer programs, enterprise wide systems, business processes, safety procedures …. and …. and ……! We have to teach, train, measure, control, monitor and enforce.
That’s what managers do – all day, almost every day. And unfortunately it is the Bottom Line and it is not negotiable. It is a linear relentless journey to effectiveness. Some prefer to call it “Execution Excellence” - it seems to sound better!
But in all of this we seem so often to forget the key input – the flipside of the challenge. It’s energy – the energy to get things done. Without energy, with batteries that are flat, getting anything done becomes difficult, sometimes impossible. It’s the blindingly obvious and I missed it for half my business career!
Leaders understand that balance between effectiveness and energy is crucial …. on a sustainable basis. They can create the conditions in which high energy effective teams of high energy effective individuals constantly outperform low energy teams and low energy individuals. Managers simply cannot.
Low personal energy, low or negative energy in an organisation, is as infectious as a virus. It doesn’t take too long to infect the customers and low negative energy customers are a nightmare.
We have developed a simple but reliable tool to measure energy at the personal level, amongst the leadership, and at the organisational level. It’s an Energy Survey (eQ) and it provides a “photograph” of the levels of energy and how it is flowing (or not flowing!), and whether it is negative or healthy.
We would love to show it to you. It is the first step in creating leadership. Leaders are energy aware. Managers simply don’t have the time to be.
