// Blog Grid Equal Height

LEADERS ARE THE STEWARD OF ORGANISATIONAL ENERGY

CRAFT Leadership

Performance, health and happiness are based on the skilful management of energy. Energy is our most precious resource.

As a leader how valuable would it be to bring more positive energy and passion into your organisation?

If those you lead would bring more positive energy into the workplace, how would it affect their relationships with their colleagues and the quality of service that they deliver to customers and clients?

Leaders are the steward of organisational energy. They can both inspire and demoralize others by how effectively they manage their own energy and how well they mobilize, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead.

According to Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz the skilful management of energy, individually and organisationally makes possible the full engagement.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.

There are four key energy management principles that are critical for building the capacity to live a productive and fully engaged life.

4 KEY ENERGY MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES

PRINCIPLE #1

Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual (being purposeful, has a why to live). Each profoundly influences the others.

PRINCIPLE #2

Energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with periodical energy renewal. We rarely consider how much energy we are spending because we take it for granted and wrongly assume energy available to us is limitless. We are running in an endless marathon, pushing ourselves for beyond healthy levels of exertion. We become flat liners mentally and emotionally by relentlessly spending energy without sufficient recovery. We must learn to live our own lives as a series sprints – fully engaging for periods of time, then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back to sprint again.

PRINCIPLE #3

To build capacity we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do. Interestingly stress is not the enemy in our lives. Paradoxically, it is the key to growth. In order to build strength in a muscle – I personally learned it in depth over the last year and a half when I lost 40 kg -, we must systematically stress it, which literally cause microscopic tears in the muscle fibres. At the end of each training sessions the functional capacity is diminished. But give the muscles 24 to 48 hours to recover and it grows stronger. We build emotional, mental and spiritual capacity exactly the same way as we build physical capacity.

PRINCIPLE #4

Positive energy rituals – highly specific routines for managing energy – are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance. Change is difficult. We are creatures of habits. Most of what we do is automatic and non-conscious. The problem with most efforts at change is that the conscious effort cannot be sustained in the long run. Therefore, in order to change you need to use positive rituals (behaviour that becomes automatic over time) fuelled by some deeply held values. The power of rituals is that they insure that we use as little conscious energy as possible where it is not absolutely necessary, leaving us to free to strategically focus the energy available to us in creative and enriching ways. Aristotle said “We are what we repeatedly do.”

THE CHANGE PROCESS FOR BETTER ENERGY MANAGEMENT

  • Define Purpose
  • Face the Truth
  • Take Action

So let’s face the truth…

How are you spending your energy now?

How can you keep performing at your best without sacrificing your health, your happiness and your passion for life?

Which of the four areas (mental, emotional, physical and spiritual) do you feel the most deficit in?

What does your energy budget look like?

 

Source: The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz