Am I being an effective leader? Am I managing colleagues effectively? Am I giving them the tools and guidance necessary to be successful in achieving our clients’ goals? As an account director at Metis Communications, these are questions I have been asking myself recently. I don’t consider myself a natural leader. But, when the yardage chains keep moving down the field, and touchdowns are added to the scoreboard, I’d like to think so. However, there is always room to evaluate how effective we are as leaders.
Then, I learned about the Bureau of Digital’s webinar on leadership energy. This interactive session focused on an aspect of leadership that I never considered, and suspect many other leaders have not as well: energy.
It never crossed my mind that to be a strong leader, you needed the energy to do so. However, following the webinar, I immediately began trying to see how what I learned fit into my agency life.
Here are a few key takeaways that gave me a sense of clarity.
You don’t always have a full charge
Effectively leadership requires energy, which is relatively finite.
Energy = capacity/ability to do work
We only have so much of it, so we must decide where we want to, and can, commit it. Like with so many other areas in business, it’s a resource investment, on which you hope you gain a return. But we don’t always take the most direct path to reach our goals, and often overextend ourselves in pursuit of a goal that may not outweigh the cost of achievement. Both can easily be viewed as energy wasted.
The latter example -- sunk cost fallacy -- shows that we, as humans, will often go to great lengths to protect even a nominal investment, because humans are inherently risk-averse. An example of this is purchasing a $20 show ticket, then driving five hours through a blizzard and a construction zone to see the act. This begs the questions, “was it worth it?” To some, it may have been, in which case it was energy well spent. To others, not as much, but yet, we do it anyway.
With a limited amount of energy, we need to be acutely attuned with our reserves and ask ‘how much is really required to achieve a goal?’ and ‘is the return worth the investment?’ These questions are especially important to assess at a time when people are running low on energy in general. COVID, isolation, the election and political landscape, along with the idea of life not returning to “normal” until 2022, are all exhausting and enough cause for people to wake up each morning and arrive at their desks with far less than a full charge.
Want to vs. have to
As said before, leadership involves many facets, from guiding to teaching and encouraging. It also involves filing invoices, paperwork, evaluations and other less exciting, behind-the-scenes tasks that don’t offer much of an emotional/energy ROI. While we’d all certainly prefer to lead a brainstorm that will produce the next big thing for a client, we have to tend to the housekeeping as well. Consider scheduling time to address these tasks, versus waiting for the right time to just come around (it never does).
Decision making is another task that often gets put off, for it is fatiguing. We all want to make good decisions that will lead us directly to the goal and avoid any sunk cost fallacies. This leads to worrying, which some say is “suffering twice.”
Try to reserve the morning for making the tougher calls where you will want people’s input, for that is when folks have more energy to think and process. In fact, parole hearings are more likely to be approved in the morning versus the afternoon because our brains run out of the ability to make decisions over the course of the day.
Audit your energy
Effective energy management can often be like trying to figure out which slot machine at the casino is paying out the most but it’s important to audit your energy. To do this, consider how much energy you may get back for each unit of energy spent, and which items will require more than you have to give.
For example, when it comes to content creation, documents pass through (or should) a lot of checks. When editing content that requires a lot of touches, it is often asked “given the amount of time spent editing, could I have just written this faster myself?” Perhaps. However, if one spends the time and energy editing, they should make sure the reasoning and a learning experience are provided to the original creator. After all, if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.
Personally speaking, energy spent educating and sharing always seems like energy well spent so teaching is approached as a desired duty. There are few better feelings than seeing a colleague apply a lesson learned to hit a home run. These investments give energy back.
Someone else’s journey
Everything we do as leaders has an impact on our organization. We are all on the hook to deliver certain things and we need to unlock both our teams’ energy as well as our own. This is particularly true during these uncertain times where collaboration is critical.
We all work in different ways, in how we approach tasks and manage our time. While we may not be able to change the way a person works, we can change how we work with them. Being empathic to this is key.
A good leader will amplify their colleagues, but you cannot set yourself on fire to keep the world warm. Remain aware of what you have in the tank and how that will affect being impactful, and providing the necessary guidance. Folks are counting on you. You’re playing a supporting role in someone else’s journey. And you’ll need energy to do that.
Interested in writing for the Bureau of Digital blog? We’re always looking for guest bloggers! Reach out to smith@bureauofdigital.com.