As we transition into 2025, the demands on executive leadership only intensify. While the holidays may have offered a pause (hopefully), the festive season often brings its own kind of chaos. The return to the rhythm of complex organisations often brings a renewed sense of urgency. To navigate constant change and drive organisational success, it's imperative that we, as leaders, prioritise and manage our own energy as a key performance lever.
Your energy levels are not simply a personal matter; they directly impact your leadership effectiveness, your team’s performance, and the organisation’s overall success. Think of yourself, and your teams, as needing multiple "energy batteries" that require intentional recharging.
Energy matters
Francesca Giulia Mereu and Jennifer Jordan in their Harvard Business Review article "The Restorative Power of Small Habits," highlights five key energy batteries: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social. Just like a car won't run without fuel, your leadership falters when one or more of these batteries are drained.
Energy batteries
Before we dive into some strategies, let's consider the signs of energy depletion that we need to be mindful of:
Physical: Decreased stamina, reliance on stimulants, sleep challenges impact resilience and decision-making.
Mental: Difficulty maintaining focus, heightened stress levels, a sense of being overwhelmed compromises strategic thinking.
Emotional: Increased frustration, compromised empathy, diminished ability to connect with your team impact morale and culture.
Spiritual: Feeling disconnected from purpose, diminishing meaning in the work can impact focus and long-term strategy.
Social: Feeling isolated or disconnected, increased conflict with others can decrease collective productivity and collaboration.
The five energy batteries: A strategic advantage
Leadership in complex organisations isn't about pushing through exhaustion; it's about mastering your own energy as a strategic asset. By implementing specific, targeted micro-habits, we can optimise our energy levels and, in turn, amplify our leadership capabilities and create high-performance teams. Building on Mereu and Jordan’s concepts, I offer some ideas to get you started.
Physical:
Purposeful movement: In between meetings, take two minutes to stretch your shoulders and neck. Move your body helps restore focus.
Walking meetings: Use walking meetings as an opportunity for both movement and focused dialogue.
Hydration for performance: A glass of water before each meeting can reduce mental fatigue and optimise decision-making.
Mental:
Strategic reflection: Begin and end the day with a brief reflection to sharpen focus on key priorities.
Capture and clarify: Immediately capture key insights and decisions from meetings to maintain momentum and clarity.
Digital discipline: Establish a specific time to disconnect to enhance strategic thinking and reduce cognitive overload.
Emotional:
Mindful state management: Before critical interactions, consciously acknowledge and manage your emotional state.
Gratitude and recognition: A daily journal focusing on positive interactions highlights and reinforces progress.
Intentional breaks: Consciously engaging in enjoyable activities provides a mental and emotional reset.
Spiritual:
Vision-aligned planning: When setting your weekly priorities, ask yourself: “How will my actions this week serve a greater vision and my deepest values?”
Nature breaks: Integrate short, intentional moments of connection with nature (e.g. observing the sky, listening to sounds, feeling the grass under your feet) to broaden perspective and to focus on what truly matters.
Values-driven action review: At the close of each day, mindfully review your actions and identify instances where you exemplified your core leadership values. Ask: “How did I show up today that was true to my most important values?”
Social:
Team recognition: Brief, targeted messages of appreciation to team members foster collaboration and trust.
Intentional connection: Regular, focused breaks with colleagues are an opportunity for connection and team growth.
Purposeful connection: Consciously creating dedicated, uninterrupted time for loved ones to recharge and strengthen support networks.
Making it work: Strategic practice
These micro-habits are designed for maximum impact with minimal disruption to your schedule: quick to implement, easily adapted, and strategically designed for sustained impact. It is not about perfection, but strategic evolution. The key is to identify where your energy is most challenged. Is it the mental battery during periods of strategic change? Or the emotional battery when facing tough decisions? Select the areas that are most critical for effective leadership and focus efforts.
Strategic considerations
Prioritise and focus: Select one to two micro-habits based on immediate need and organisational priorities. Experiment and adapt.
Start small, stay consistent: Choose manageable habits to maintain focus and momentum.
Strategic focus: Integrate new habits into existing routines to maximise your efforts.
The broader impact: Building a high-performance culture
Our energy management serves as a model for the entire organisation. When leaders prioritise their own resilience and effectiveness, it creates a culture that sustains high performance through constant change. This is about building organisational strength through individual focus.
What about you?
As leaders, we are always in the business of constant improvement. What micro-habits have you found most effective in cultivating and sustaining your leadership energy and effectiveness? I invite you to share your insights below so other leaders can benefit from your successes.
Grace Thomas, PCC, believes that leadership team culture and effectiveness shape the entire organisational fabric. Enhancing leadership team effectiveness drives positive change and outcomes. Senior executive leaders, leadership teams and emerging leaders in complex, global, multi-national and Australian organisations work with Grace to elevate and accelerate their leadership growth and impact in their work, life and ever-evolving world.
Grace is open to genuine requests to connect on LinkedIn as we never know how and when paths cross. Allergic to sales pitches or spam!
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