Manage
Your Energy, Not Your Time
Steve Wanner is a highly respected
37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children.
When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt
perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family
in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept
poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead
grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.
Wanner’s experience is not uncommon.
Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer
hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, mentally, and
emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of
distraction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We
at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the
course of doing consulting and coaching at large organizations during the past
five years. With remarkable consistency, these executives tell us they’re
pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are
at a breaking point.
The core problem with working longer
hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined
in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in
human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be
systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific
rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled,
with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible.
To effectively reenergize their
workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of
people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more
of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to
recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility
for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.
The rituals and behaviors Wanner
established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier
bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence,
when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now
does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After
working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts
in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He
leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk
outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better
able to connect with his wife and children.
Establishing simple rituals like
these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we
took a group of employees through a pilot energy management program and then
measured their performance against that of a control group. The participants
outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value
of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their
customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal
satisfaction. In this article, we’ll describe the Wachovia study in a little
more detail. Then we’ll explain what executives and managers can do to increase
and regularly renew work capacity—the approach used by the Energy Project,
which builds on, deepens, and extends several core concepts developed by Tony’s
former partner Jim Loehr in his seminal work with athletes.
Linking Capacity and Performance at
Wachovia
Most large organizations invest in
developing employees’ skills, knowledge, and competence. Very few help build
and sustain their capacity—their energy—which is typically taken for granted.
In fact, greater capacity makes it possible to get more done in less time at a
higher level of engagement and with more sustainability. Our experience at
Wachovia bore this out.
Taken from
http://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time/sb2