How to make every year the year of managing energy

"I learned early that you only have so much energy to give. You have to spend it correctly.” — Eva Gabor

Every year  brings an opportunity for companies to rebuild a workplace environment where work is focused and people are flexible. Long gone should be the days of unproductive meetings, teams working on items that are no longer relevant, managers living in crippling indecisiveness, and individuals trying to maintain rigidity in their roles.

This is why I think every year should be the year of managing energy. The better we become at creating clarity, getting organized and staying flexible, the more successful our teams will be at managing collective energy and performing better together.

Here are some ideas to help you and your teams manage their energy:

• Get focused. Work with your team to build a statement of your team’s ultimate priority. You read it right. Not your priorities, but your priority. Priorities is a relatively new term in the English language, and multiple priorities do not help with focus or managing energy. Ideally, as a manager, you are close enough to the business needs, your boss’s thoughts, and your team’s capabilities to build this priority with your team. This priority will change over time as you deliver on current business needs. Example: As a team, our priority is to successfully implement new technology for our sales teams while maintaining service level agreement response times.
• Get clear. Determine what needs to be done in the current environment to stay focused on this priority and define what success looks like together. This will also help create purpose-driven activities that help drive meaning for your team and value for the business. Don’t forget, clarity is kind and inclusion is key. Make sure everyone can contribute by providing their thoughts, concerns, and expertise to help build the list. This will eventually be your portfolio of work. For fast-paced businesses growing exponentially, maybe you make a list that covers the next four months. Perhaps you run a team that needs to take the twelve-month view. Ordering the list, deciding who does what (with a backup listed), negotiating resources, and defining the success of each work package are just a few of the ways you can ensure your team has clarity and can manage their energy to deliver.
• Get flexible, stay human and communicate: Cy Wakeman states ‘… managers and employees need to be ready, willing and able to deliver what the business requires in the current moment.” The current moment may require something different today than yesterday, and everyone should be clear that as the year evolves, their work may take various forms. One key element to helping this become the team’s mindset: don’t leave your team in the dark. Tell them if a project they are working on is stalled because you forgot to set up a meeting with approvers. Explain that a project won’t continue because funding fell through due to misaligned priorities across the business. If resources need to be shifted to drive forward another work package, make sure they understand why. The better you are at modeling your own humanity through vulnerability, transparently communicating what’s going on, and being flexible, the less energy everyone uses. The goal here is to make sure that everyone knows on time and in time what is changing, why, and how it will impact them so they can get back to doing work that matters.
• Get organized for meetings. Time is a nonrenewable resource. Every moment we spend in meetings is time that will not be returned to us. Strive to ensure meetings have a clear purpose, there are clear contribution expectations for each participant, and make sure you and your participants have time to prepare. Where creating these elements isn’t possible, it is ok to reschedule or cancel if needs change.
• Get creative. Create opportunities for connection and rest for your team. Maybe this means ‘no meeting Wednesdays’, or ‘no slack Thursdays’. Maybe once per quarter you take a training together. You could make sure you spend time with a report when they return from holiday to talk about their time away (pictures please!). A monthly birthday celebration for team members who share a birthday month could be fun. Virtual or in-person hot drink date anyone? Whatever the idea, make sure your team has a chance to get away from pushing to get work done and can engage with each other in a meaningful way. This helps to ensure you can restore energy together.

I pose, that the above will not only put order to the work of the team, but will also help reduce the following energy-draining activities in your workplace:

• Managers being unclear on what teams are working on and why
• Teams wondering why certain work is being done
• Indecisiveness causing frustration and stalled progress
• Crisis management and panic for avoidable issues
• Team members spend time talking about how unproductive a meeting was
• Team members spend time trying to figure out later what they are supposed to do with the information from a meeting
• Other teams successfully push work on your team or your team does duplicate work because no one can clearly state the team’s priority and work portfolio.
• Etc, etc., etc

Of course, managing a team and delivering work can be complex when balancing business, team, and individual needs. Very few decisions are simple and it can be hard to know how to make the ‘right’ next move. Hopefully, the above ideas will help you carefully consider what your teams do and how they do it so you can all feel that your collective energy is well spent.



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