The energy of your organization is the sum of the individual, collective and synergistic energy of everyone who works there. It derives from the same factors that drive Olympic marathoners: passion, success, training, exercise, recognition and coaching. It is reflected in your strategy.
Passion & Strategy
Providing emotional fuel for sustained effort helps individuals understand how their work counts and makes a difference to others. They’ll say, “I’ll feel good. I’m interested. I’ve helped these people.” A clear mission describing how society is better off is fundamental. Once the mission is set, you enable each department, team and individual to uncover their own contributions.
Unfolding Successes
These build satisfaction and confidence. Develop a long-term vision and strategy with individuals about their future contribution and craft short-term, explicit goals. With specific action plans, they experience success as they complete each action, pass each milestone, and accomplish each goal. Success can result from the journey; and even if the goal is not fully achieved, help individuals recognize and celebrate the impact that their efforts have created.
Constant Training
This is a central part of every athlete’s actions because it builds greater success. Assess with employees where investment in training will pay off in greater achievement and positive net returns for your organization. Develop a training plan to grow their skills in stages, building their overall competence to go farther.
Exercise New Skills
Utilize skills acquired in professional development. Training scheduled in advance of upcoming milestones provides the chance for new skills to be used. Ensure opportunities exist to measure results, celebrate successes, and receive coaching for improvements.
Recognition Matters
Crowds cheer marathoners as they stride toward the finish line. They react with strong positive feelings and increased effort. We all respond the same way when those we respect pay attention to our efforts and deliver timely, sincere, positive feedback. Leaders can work with managers to ensure they give attention and comment daily on individual efforts and achievements, even relatively small ones.
Planning & Strategy
Help people to define goals, identify their shortfalls, provide guidance and training, determine actions to change and measure their new-found success. Improve the coaching skills of all leaders in the organization.
Unleashing the energy of your organization requires a leader’s intervention, but the results of your strategy can be exponential – generating even more energy and improved results.
To see all of our TAC coaches who help organizations cultivate their energy, click here.