You, as the manager, have the biggest impact on your team.
More than 69 percent of workers report their manager has more impact on their wellbeing than their partner or healthcare professionals.
That means when you are trying to create an energy-inspired culture, you have a heavy influence over your people. They listen to your words, and they also pick up on your nonverbal cues.
A change in tone of voice, an eye roll, or a shoulder shrug can speak volumes to people who feel uncertain about their footing with you and within the company. Often, what you’re not saying matters.
When What You Say Isn’t What They Need to Hear
Some phrases are lip service to the idea of rest and work-life balance. They almost never actually work unless you’ve built your culture around recovery and sustainable performance. For example, have you ever heard yourself or another leader tell a team member:
- “Take time for yourself,” but without the offer of flex time or a change in hours/expectations.
- “Make sure you’re taking time for exercise,” but without clear support to add movement into an already overfilled schedule.
- “Don’t check email at night” but send messages in the evening and expect responses at all hours.
The goal here from a well-meaning manager is work-life balance; however, the result is more often a dissonance between what you say you value and what you show you value.
What Creates These Issues? And What’s the Solution?
Consider who you are on your best day, and your worst. What’s the difference? The amount of fuel you have available.
You’ve heard the concept of being “hangry,” mad and reactive because you are hungry. There’s an equivalent state when you’re drained across the entire spectrum of energy, whether the drains come from internal or external circumstances.
How This Shows Up Within Us
Energy is transmitted through our actions, words, and body language, so if we’re physically tired, emotionally depleted, and mentally not present we are more likely to show up impatient and agitated.
We tend to be short with people and can demonstrate either passive-aggressiveness or hostile directness. And when we see or feel people in emotional pain, we don’t ask how they are doing in the same way we would if they showed up with an arm in a splint.
How This Shows Up In Teams
The same lack of clarity that drives internal confusion can affect the way teams function together. When you develop a performance-focused culture without an understanding of its costs, you create a workplace that’s long on expectations and short on opportunities to refuel.
There are many ways we can act, but only four ways we can feel. We can function in:
- Performance state, where we are positive, charged, and eager
- Survival state, where we are still working but challenged by fatigue and disengagement
- Regenerate state, where we recover and refuel
- Burnout state, where we are exhausted with little or nothing to give
We often give lip service to the idea of an energy-inspired workplace. But, when we don’t back it up with what our people really need to be successful, we push them into survival or burnout. Effectively, we lose them. We create workplaces that are physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting, and where our people start to disengage or distrust us, instead of being vibrantly ready to take charge and move forward.
What Do Your People Actually Need to See and Hear?
If you want a sustainable high-performance workplace culture, you have to create it. Show your people what you want by living it yourself.
Your decisions and your actions influence behavior across your team, peer group, and organization, so what you say/how you act (your verbal and non-verbal communication skills) influences their behaviors and their ability to work with high positive energy.
If you Say You Value Transparency, Live It
People feel valued when they understand what’s happening and why. Say you’ll share what you know when you can. If there’s something you can’t share, you can make that known as well.
When you tell your employees, as much as possible, why things are happening, they spend less time ruminating on challenges or stressing over the unknown. Their energy can go toward productive efforts, rather than toward worrying about situations that could easily be controlled with the appropriate flow of information.
If You Say “People First,” Show It
If you say people are your most important resource, how do you back it up? How do you ensure that the people don’t become the lowest priority as you chase goals and allocate resources?
Saying people first means you treat people as your most valuable resource, understanding that it’s their energy that fuels the organization.
If people are not your priority, then don’t say that. You’ll only alienate them. Some companies can function without a people-first orientation, because the people realize what they’re getting into. The issue is when you say you value your people, then expect them to work in a way that shows they’re just another commodity.
If You Say You Have Priorities, Maintain Them
Your people need to hear what actually matters in your workplace. Everything can’t always be urgent, and every project can’t always be a priority. What they need to hear in this case is fewer artificial deadlines and a greater understanding of what’s really creating value.
Living and performing at our best in the workplace is a challenge. We don’t work in a bubble and we handle stress with no dress rehearsal. The macro stressors of life’s challenges are enough to face; it becomes even more difficult when we are dealing with stress at an individual level.
However, recognizing the challenges we’re facing that drain our team members is a start. Once we’re aware of the power we maintain to support them, we can begin to inspire action and move them (and ourselves) toward more sustainable performance and meaningful impact.
