Why is Energy Crucial for Effective Leadership?

Whether you are at a Christmas dinner with your in-laws or at a business meeting with your micromanaging boss, or at the board meeting where you’re pitching a big project as a CEO, the quality of the energy is going to tremendously influence everybody in the room. It’s going to tremendously influence the outcome of the meeting not just for you as an individual, but for everybody as a collective. And that’s what matters for me when I’m working with you as a client or when we’re having a conversation since what we are after is to really engage and invite energy which has the capacity to change and materialize your vision. 

So if you come out from a big drinking meeting, or dinner, the quality of your sleep is going to be severely impacted and therefore the next day you will have more difficulty lifting yourself and generating ideas and coming from a light, engaging and motivating space. 

Similarly, if you have a tough conversation with your boss or peer because of some difficult negotiation you’re going through, if you haven’t learned to recover to your center, to be able to have access to this energy we talked about earlier, it is soon going to be very hard for you to be fully present in this specific meeting. The quality of those meetings and of a year is the compound effect of those meetings across the organization. So when you manage to pay attention to your energy in every one of those meetings and recover to your higher quality of energy, you become able to shift the trajectory of your organization and of course your career. However, that’s beside the point at this stage. 

When people around the table are doing the same thing, we as a team are much more likely to succeed. This is what we see on the football field or on the basketball team when everybody is able to cultivate the right ecosystem for the team and for themselves, the impact is tremendous. I have seen it every single time in extremely fast-growing organizations that don’t have the luxury of time and sometimes the luxury of budget. 

I’ve also seen very rich companies that are sometimes moving at a much slower pace. The quality of energy is always exchanging the outcome. We can have great ideas, but actually, sometimes it doesn’t matter. What matters is our capacity to execute, recover, pivot, come back and do it again. Having the idea, executing, getting feedback, pivoting, if necessary, or continuing to do it again. The compounding effect of those various moments is going to generate the impact you have as a group. We see that in our everyday life, in our family life. We often daze at space when things are more difficult to manage when we go back to our parents or all those people who are very good at triggering us. Suddenly we become a victim or the other way around because that’s a space where we pay less attention. And I don’t believe that we should pay less attention to those relationships. I think we should simply allow ourselves to create what we want. We should take responsibility in those places as well. Because when you take responsibility and offer energy which is a bit more inclusive, a bit more forgiving, you create a very different outcome. That’s true for family life, friendships and organizational life. 

There is one more crucial thing to address. We’re talking about energy because ultimately everything we do is a fruit. Everything we do is a result of that energy. Like in nature, as the quality of the soil is going to determine the quality of the tree, which is going to determine the quality of the fruit, the weather—all of that is helpful. Yet it’s the quality of the energy of all these elements that are going to generate the fruit. And for an organization, for a team, for a leader, the quality of your energy is the soil. Everything else is fruit. Some of those fruits are good for cooking and good for eating. Some of those fruits are good to be let go, to drop, to be completely released. Therefore, the more we pay attention to the quality of our own energy, the more we can trust that the fruits we choose to eat or choose to share are the good one