The Importance of Leading With Energy

Oct 28

In my reading of Fans First this week, I covered the section on energy, detailing how you get energy from doing what you love. It is just another reminder of the importance of leading with strong, positive energy. Upon my own reflection, here are three reasons why positive energy is great for your organization:

When you have good energy, you are a steady leader. People follow steady leaders happily because steadiness breeds feelings of safety and trust. As a steady leader, your energy prepares you to respond, not react. Now, I will admit that you may get it right every now and then by being reactive, but most of the time, the risk of reacting is something you should strive to prevent as much as possible.
Strong energy will give you productive stamina. Your energy will multiply and lengthen your ability to stay productive longer. Your ability to withstand stress will increase. This means that your people can come to you, as their leader, with stressful situations and your ability to handle them appropriately is derived directly from the energy you brought to the day.
Energy is contagious to your team. When you bring good energy to your team, it spreads very quickly. People are very happy to receive your positive energy and then continue to spread that to others. The inverse of this, of course, is true, as well. If you bring bad energy to the team, it can and will bring them down.

So, this begs the question: what are the energy STEALERS and BUILDERS?

Here are the top three things that take energy away from us:

Hate: As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Hate is too great a burden to bear.” When we lean into hate and divisive activities or thoughts, we are truly robbed of our productive energy. Hate multiples hate and divides teams in irreparable ways. Steady leaders do not turn their teams against themselves. Don’t let hateful thoughts hold you captive.
Stress: While stress can sometimes be productive – motivating – most levels of stress move well beyond productivity. It is important to understand your team and know the point at which stress becomes unproductive for each person. Consider: who are the people on your team you know you can challenge and they will respond by rising to the challenge? Conversely, who are the people on your team that will be crippled by challenging?
Negativity: I love the saying, “Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.” No problem was solved with negativity. You have to be positive to be constructive enough to solve a problem. Too much negativity all of the time is going to steal your energy and everyone’s energy around you. Now, I do think there is an appropriate role for some pessimism in business. On our team, we call it “the black hat thinking.” When you deploy this, you explicitly preface it by telling your team, “I am going to put my black hat on and tell you some things that could go wrong…” When you label it first, you point out that you are using this negative thinking productively and in a preventative way to facilitate growth.

Here are three things we can harness to build energy in ourselves and our team:

Love: Love your people; love what you do. Choose to do both every morning. When you love your people, that is going to build the energy inside you and also build up the energy within your team. When you love what you do, you will quite literally whistle while you work hard – and that’s an energy builder right there!
Great Communication: When sports coaches attribute their success to their teams “really gelling,” “moving in lockstep,” we know their team is working together as one unit rather than as a group of individuals. That is all tied to the strength of their communication. When your team is communicating really effectively, it will build energy. You and your team will execute with confidence and pride because you all know what you need to do, how you need to accomplish it, when you need to do it, and who you will need to bring along with you.
Routine: By routine, I mean health. What is your routine on a daily basis to get yourself into peak state? That peak energy mode will allow you to consistently be your best for your team and the world. We all have a routine that if we were to implement it every day, it would put us in the peak position to succeed. Take time to sit down, put pen to paper, and ask yourself what this routine looks like. It should start the night before with some mindset work where you set some of the conditions you need to be successful. Then, when you wake up in the morning, all you have to do is that first part of your routine for the day. If you can tackle that first part – that first step in your energy-building routine – then you can and will do all the steps and set yourself up for a great day.

I promise you – when you bring that positive energy to yourself and your team, you will be the steady leader that everyone desires you to be. I urge you not to belittle the importance of energy. Stay focused on it and do everything you can to make it – and keep it – great.