How do you plan the energy needs of your people?
Jenny Campbell CEO of the Resilience Dynamic asks senior leaders this question.
Whilst useful conversations are happening about energy and wellbeing, shifting the conversation to aligning energy with your business cycle is transformative. The energy of your people is a strategic business asset and critical to your business outcomes.
Examples of workplace energy / pace
Are you aware of the different kinds of energy and mood needed for different kinds of work across your organisation?
- For creativity and innovation, you need people to experiment, take risks, seek insight and data
- For times of closing the deals or projects, what is the quality of the mental and emotional pace needed?
- For times of uncertainty, with the need to stay cool-headed, look outwards, and sense check your priorities, what state do you as leaders need?
Are all of the above the same requirements?
At the macro level, how to you proactively build the right kind of energy to match the needs of your business cycle?
How do you even know where to start? Do you have a sense of the energy today? Do you know what drives it up and down? Do you know how to foster pace across your teams?
Organisations Resilience
An organisation’s resilience is the amount of change is can successfully absorb. The keywords here are successfully and change. Far from resilience being about doubling down and just toughening it out, it is the strategic capability to choose whether to pivot or to stand firm – and then the capacity to activate that decision quickly. Pace or energy is a major component of this resilience capability.
Resilience isn’t just a haphazard outcome of hard-fought lessons learnt. It is both practical and simple, but it needs strategic backing and attention. One of the key differences in a resilient organisation is attending to energy needs specifically and proactively.
The direct drivers of resilience are Being Present, Pace, Learning (especially how you learn) and Purpose. Unlock each of these across your teams and you will find your ability to activate the right kind of mental and emotional energy at the right time.
The Resilience Dynamic team have been working recently with many leadership teams, helping them activate resilience quickly in the face of very uncertain times.
Case Study One:
The newly formed European leadership team of a global manufacturing company, have completely embraced the need for aligning around the resilience of their people. They need to handle growth and recruitment of new talent, which is difficult in the current talent market. Plus, significant structural change. And to ensure wellness through it all.
What has made the difference so far?
Two things: the clarity that their team purpose is wholly connected to the pace of their people, and the deliberate structures and processes put in place to attend to the organisation’s energy.
This involves using our new Resilience ‘Dashboard’ service, enabling everyone to ‘See’ the resilience data – thereby putting a stop to assuming blindly.
The See-Understand-Optimise framework we help organisations adopt is strongly in play here.
Case Study Two:
The extended leadership team of an innovation consultancy organisation, are at the start of this resilience discovery.
Their initial insight – transformative in their case – is that they need to consider the kind of energy they need across their business cycle, and how they integrate the ‘selling end’ of their business with the ‘delivery end’.
Each side of the business has its own rhythm in the year, yet together, they need to be aligned.
What is the energy actually of each side of the business? Where are the pinch points? How can the energies of both then be more synchronised?
Overall, how can they stop the incredible inefficiency of the way they currently work, which is reactive, heads-down, and push-push-push – which only causes friction and leads to great talent exiting?
The whole effort of this push-push-push is addressing the wrong end of the energy requirements. Plan it proactively and life is a lot smoother. And happier.
We work alongside our clients, right at the heart of this tussle-y work. Personally, it’s an eye-opener for me, as an experienced and senior practitioner, to see senior leaders discover the powerful insights around energy and resilience.
I realise each time, that I can take it for granted that everyone knows this stuff.
They often do not. Do you?
Author – Jenny Campbell – Follow me on LinkedIn