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.
In early 2006 we took 106 employees at 12 regional banks in southern
New Jersey through a curriculum of four modules, each of which focused
on specific strategies for strengthening one of the four main dimensions
of energy. We delivered it at one-month intervals to groups of
approximately 20 to 25, ranging from senior leaders to lower-level
managers. We also assigned each attendee a fellow employee as a source
of support between sessions. Using Wachovia’s own key performance
metrics, we evaluated how the participant group performed compared with a
group of employees at similar levels at a nearby set of Wachovia banks
who did not go through the training. To create a credible basis for
comparison, we looked at year-over-year percentage changes in
performance across several metrics.
On a measure called the “Big 3”—revenues from three kinds of
loans—the participants showed a year-over-year increase that was 13
percentage points greater than the control group’s in the first three
months of our study. On revenues from deposits, the participants
exceeded the control group’s year-over-year gain by 20 percentage points
during that same period. The precise gains varied month by month, but
with only a handful of exceptions, the participants continued to
significantly outperform the control group for a full year after
completing the program. Although other variables undoubtedly influenced
these outcomes, the participants’ superior performance was notable in
its consistency.
We also asked participants how the program influenced them
personally. Sixty-eight percent reported that it had a positive impact
on their relationships with clients and customers. Seventy-one percent
said that it had a noticeable or substantial positive impact on their
productivity and performance. These findings corroborated a raft of
anecdotal evidence we’ve gathered about the effectiveness of this
approach among leaders at other large companies such as Ernst &
Young, Sony, Deutsche Bank, Nokia, ING Direct, Ford, and MasterCard.
The Body: Physical Energy
Our program begins by focusing on physical energy. It is scarcely
news that inadequate nutrition, exercise, sleep, and rest diminish
people’s basic energy levels, as well as their ability to manage their
emotions and focus their attention. Nonetheless, many executives don’t
find ways to practice consistently healthy behaviors, given all the
other demands in their lives.
Before participants in our program begin to explore ways to increase
their physical energy, they take an energy audit, which includes four
questions in each energy dimension—body, emotions, mind, and spirit.
(See the exhibit “Are You Headed for an Energy Crisis?”) On average,
participants get eight to ten of those 16 questions “wrong,” meaning
they’re doing things such as skipping breakfast, failing to express
appreciation to others, struggling to focus on one thing at a time, or
spending too little time on activities that give them a sense of
purpose. While most participants aren’t surprised to learn these
behaviors are counterproductive, having them all listed in one place is
often uncomfortable, sobering, and galvanizing. The audit highlights
employees’ greatest energy deficits. Participants also fill out charts
designed to raise their awareness about how their exercise, diet, and
sleep practices influence their energy levels.
The next step is to identify rituals for building and renewing
physical energy. When Gary Faro, a vice president at Wachovia, began the
program, he was significantly overweight, ate poorly, lacked a regular
exercise routine, worked long hours, and typically slept no more than
five or six hours a night. That is not an unusual profile among the
leaders and managers we see. Over the course of the program, Faro began
regular cardiovascular and strength training. He started going to bed at
a designated time and sleeping longer. He changed his eating habits
from two big meals a day (“Where I usually gorged myself,” he says) to
smaller meals and light snacks every three hours. The aim was to help
him stabilize his glucose levels over the course of the day, avoiding
peaks and valleys. He lost 50 pounds in the process, and his energy
levels soared. “I used to schedule tough projects for the morning, when I
knew that I would be more focused,” Faro says. “I don’t have to do that
anymore because I find that I’m just as focused now at 5
pm as I am at 8
am.”
Another key ritual Faro adopted was to take brief but regular breaks
at specific intervals throughout the workday—always leaving his desk.
The value of such breaks is grounded in our physiology. “Ultradian
rhythms” refer to 90- to 120-minute cycles during which our bodies
slowly move from a high-energy state into a physiological trough. Toward
the end of each cycle, the body begins to crave a period of recovery.
The signals include physical restlessness, yawning, hunger, and
difficulty concentrating, but many of us ignore them and keep working.
The consequence is that our energy reservoir—our remaining
capacity—burns down as the day wears on.
Intermittent breaks for renewal, we have found, result in higher and
more sustainable performance. The length of renewal is less important
than the quality. It is possible to get a great deal of recovery in a
short time—as little as several minutes—if it involves a ritual that
allows you to disengage from work and truly change channels. That could
range from getting up to talk to a colleague about something other than
work, to listening to music on an iPod, to walking up and down stairs in
an office building. While breaks are countercultural in most
organizations and counterintuitive for many high achievers, their value
is multifaceted.
Matthew Lang is a managing director for Sony in South Africa. He
adopted some of the same rituals that Faro did, including a 20-minute
walk in the afternoons. Lang’s walk not only gives him a mental and
emotional breather and some exercise but also has become the time when
he gets his best creative ideas. That’s because when he walks he is not
actively thinking, which allows the dominant left hemisphere of his
brain to give way to the right hemisphere with its greater capacity to
see the big picture and make imaginative leaps.
The Emotions: Quality of Energy
When people are able to take more control of their emotions, they can
improve the quality of their energy, regardless of the external
pressures they’re facing. To do this, they first must become more aware
of how they feel at various points during the workday and of the impact
these emotions have on their effectiveness. Most people realize that
they tend to perform best when they’re feeling positive energy. What
they find surprising is that they’re not able to perform well or to lead
effectively when they’re feeling any other way.
Unfortunately, without intermittent recovery, we’re not
physiologically capable of sustaining highly positive emotions for long
periods. Confronted with relentless demands and unexpected challenges,
people tend to slip into negative emotions—the fight-or-flight
mode—often multiple times in a day. They become irritable and impatient,
or anxious and insecure. Such states of mind drain people’s energy and
cause friction in their relationships. Fight-or-flight emotions also
make it impossible to think clearly, logically, and reflectively. When
executives learn to recognize what kinds of events trigger their
negative emotions, they gain greater capacity to take control of their
reactions.
One simple but powerful ritual for defusing negative emotions is what
we call “buying time.” Deep abdominal breathing is one way to do that.
Exhaling slowly for five or six seconds induces relaxation and recovery,
and turns off the fight-or-flight response. When we began working with
Fujio Nishida, president of Sony Europe, he had a habit of lighting up a
cigarette each time something especially stressful occurred—at least
two or three times a day. Otherwise, he didn’t smoke. We taught him the
breathing exercise as an alternative, and it worked immediately: Nishida
found he no longer had the desire for a cigarette. It wasn’t the
smoking that had given him relief from the stress, we concluded, but the
relaxation prompted by the deep inhalation and exhalation.
A powerful ritual that fuels positive emotions is expressing
appreciation to others, a practice that seems to be as beneficial to the
giver as to the receiver. It can take the form of a handwritten note,
an e-mail, a call, or a conversation—and the more detailed and specific,
the higher the impact. As with all rituals, setting aside a particular
time to do it vastly increases the chances of success. Ben Jenkins, vice
chairman and president of the General Bank at Wachovia in Charlotte,
North Carolina, built his appreciation ritual into time set aside for
mentoring. He began scheduling lunches or dinners regularly with people
who worked for him. Previously, the only sit-downs he’d had with his
direct reports were to hear monthly reports on their numbers or to give
them yearly performance reviews. Now, over meals, he makes it a priority
to recognize their accomplishments and also to talk with them about
their lives and their aspirations rather than their immediate work
responsibilities.
Finally, people can cultivate positive emotions by learning to change
thestories they tell themselves about the events in their lives. Often,
people in conflict cast themselves in the role of victim, blaming
others or external circumstances for their problems. Becoming aware of
the difference between the facts in a given situation and the way we
interpret those facts can be powerful in itself. It’s been a revelation
for many of the people we work with to discover they have a choice about
how to view a given event and to recognize how powerfully the story
they tell influences the emotions they feel. We teach them to tell the
most hopeful and personally empowering story possible in any given
situation, without denying or minimizing the facts.
The most effective way people can change a story is to view it
through any of three new lenses, which are all alternatives to seeing
the world from the victim perspective. With the
reverse lens,
for example, people ask themselves, “What would the other person in this
conflict say and in what ways might that be true?” With the
long lens they ask, “How will I most likely view this situation in six months?” With the
wide lens
they ask themselves, “Regardless of the outcome of this issue, how can I
grow and learn from it?” Each of these lenses can help people
intentionally cultivate more positive emotions.
Nicolas Babin, director of corporate communications for Sony Europe,
was the point person for calls from reporters when Sony went through
several recalls of its batteries in 2006. Over time he found his work
increasingly exhausting and dispiriting. After practicing the lens
exercises, he began finding ways to tell himself a more positive and
empowering story about his role. “I realized,” he explains, “that this
was an opportunity for me to build stronger relationships with
journalists by being accessible to them and to increase Sony’s
credibility by being straightforward and honest.”
The Mind: Focus of Energy
Many executives view multitasking as a necessity in the face of all
the demands they juggle, but it actually undermines productivity.
Distractions are costly: A temporary shift in attention from one task to
another—stopping to answer an e-mail or take a phone call, for
instance—increases the amount of time necessary to finish the primary
task by as much as 25%, a phenomenon known as “switching time.” It’s far
more efficient to fully focus for 90 to 120 minutes, take a true break,
and then fully focus on the next activity. We refer to these work
periods as “ultradian sprints.”
Once people see how much they struggle to concentrate, they can
create rituals to reduce the relentless interruptions that technology
has introduced in their lives. We start out with an exercise that forces
them to face the impact of daily distractions. They attempt to complete
a complex task and are regularly interrupted—an experience that, people
report, ends up feeling much like everyday life.
Dan Cluna, a vice president at Wachovia, designed two rituals to
better focus his attention. The first one is to leave his desk and go
into a conference room, away from phones and e-mail, whenever he has a
task that requires concentration. He now finishes reports in a third of
the time they used to require. Cluna built his second ritual around
meetings at branches with the financial specialists who report to him.
Previously, he would answer his phone whenever it rang during these
meetings. As a consequence, the meetings he scheduled for an hour often
stretched to two, and he rarely gave anyone his full attention. Now
Cluna lets his phone go to voice mail, so that he can focus completely
on the person in front of him. He now answers the accumulated voice-mail
messages when he has downtime between meetings.
E&Y’s hard-charging Wanner used to answer e-mail constantly
throughout the day—whenever he heard a “ping.” Then he created a ritual
of checking his e-mail just twice a day—at 10:15
am and 2:30
pm.
Whereas previously he couldn’t keep up with all his messages, he
discovered he could clear his in-box each time he opened it—the reward
of fully focusing his attention on e-mail for 45 minutes at a time.
Wanner has also reset the expectations of all the people he regularly
communicates with by e-mail. “I’ve told them if it’s an emergency and
they need an instant response, they can call me and I’ll always pick
up,” he says. Nine months later he has yet to receive such a call.
Michael Henke, a senior manager at E&Y, sat his team down at the
start of the busy season last winter and told them that at certain
points during the day he was going to turn off his Sametime (an in-house
instant-message system). The result, he said, was that he would be less
available to them for questions. Like Wanner, he told his team to call
him if any emergency arose, but they rarely did. He also encouraged the
group to take regular breaks throughout the day and to eat more
regularly. They finished the busy season under budget and more
profitable than other teams that hadn’t followed the energy renewal
program. “We got the same amount of work done in less time,” says Henke.
“It made for a win-win.”
Another way to mobilize mental energy is to focus systematically on
activities that have the most long-term leverage. Unless people
intentionally schedule time for more challenging work, they tend not to
get to it at all or rush through it at the last minute. Perhaps the most
effective focus ritual the executives we work with have adopted is to
identify each night the most important challenge for the next day and
make it their very first priority when they arrive in the morning. Jean
Luc Duquesne, a vice president for Sony Europe in Paris, used to answer
his e-mail as soon as he got to the office, just as many people do. He
now tries to concentrate the first hour of every day on the most
important topic. He finds that he often emerges at 10
am feeling as if he’s already had a productive day.
The Human Spirit: Energy of Meaning and Purpose
People tap into the energy of the human spirit when their everyday
work and activities are consistent with what they value most and with
what gives them a sense of meaning and purpose. If the work they’re
doing really matters to them, they typically feel more positive energy,
focus better, and demonstrate greater perseverance. Regrettably, the
high demands and fast pace of corporate life don’t leave much time to
pay attention to these issues, and many people don’t even recognize
meaning and purpose as potential sources of energy. Indeed, if we tried
to begin our program by focusing on the human spirit, it would likely
have minimal impact. Only when participants have experienced the value
of the rituals they establish in the other dimensions do they start to
see that being attentive to their own deeper needs dramatically
influences their effectiveness and satisfaction at work.
For E&Y partner Jonathan Anspacher, simply having the opportunity
to ask himself a series of questions about what really mattered to him
was both illuminating and energizing. “I think it’s important to be a
little introspective and say, ‘What do you want to be remembered for?’”
he told us. “You don’t want to be remembered as the crazy partner who
worked these long hours and had his people be miserable. When my kids
call me and ask, ‘Can you come to my band concert?’ I want to say, ‘Yes,
I’ll be there and I’ll be in the front row.’ I don’t want to be the
father that comes in and sits in the back and is on his Blackberry and
has to step out to take a phone call.”
To access the energy of the human spirit, people need to clarify
priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing
what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time
and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to
others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their
daily behaviors.
When
you’re attempting to discover what you do best and what you enjoy most,
it’s important to realize that these two things aren’t necessarily
mutually inclusive. You may get lots of positive feedback about
something you’re very good at but not truly enjoy it. Conversely, you
can love doing something but have no gift for it, so that achieving
success requires much more energy than it makes sense to invest.
To help program participants discover their areas of strength, we ask
them to recall at least two work experiences in the past several months
during which they found themselves in their “sweet spot”—feeling
effective, effortlessly absorbed, inspired, and fulfilled. Then we have
them deconstruct those experiences to understand precisely what
energized them so positively and what specific talents they were drawing
on. If leading strategy feels like a sweet spot, for example, is it
being in charge that’s most invigorating or participating in a creative
endeavor? Or is it using a skill that comes to you easily and so feels
good to exercise? Finally, we have people establish a ritual that will
encourage them to do more of exactly that kind of activity at work.
A senior leader we worked with realized that one of the activities he
least liked was reading and summarizing detailed sales reports, whereas
one of his favorites was brainstorming new strategies. The leader found
a direct report who loved immersing himself in numbers and delegated
the sales report task to him—happily settling for brief oral summaries
from him each day. The leader also began scheduling a free-form
90-minute strategy session every other week with the most creative
people in his group.
In the second category, devoting time and energy to what’s important
to you, there is often a similar divide between what people say is
important and what they actually do. Rituals can help close this gap.
When Jean Luc Duquesne, the Sony Europe vice president, thought hard
about his personal priorities, he realized that spending time with his
family was what mattered most to him, but it often got squeezed out of
his day. So he instituted a ritual in which he switches off for at least
three hours every evening when he gets home, so he can focus on his
family. “I’m still not an expert on PlayStation,” he told us, “but
according to my youngest son, I’m learning and I’m a good student.”
Steve Wanner, who used to talk on the cell phone all the way to his
front door on his commute home, has chosen a specific spot 20 minutes
from his house where he ends whatever call he’s on and puts away the
phone. He spends the rest of his commute relaxing so that when he does
arrive home, he’s less preoccupied with work and more available to his
wife and children.
The third category, practicing your core values in your everyday
behavior, is a challenge for many as well. Most people are living at
such a furious pace that they rarely stop to ask themselves what they
stand for and who they want to be. As a consequence, they let external
demands dictate their actions.
We don’t suggest that people explicitly define their values, because
the results are usually too predictable. Instead, we seek to uncover
them, in part by asking questions that are inadvertently revealing, such
as, “What are the qualities that you find most off-putting when you see
them in others?” By describing what they can’t stand, people
unintentionally divulge what they stand for. If you are very offended by
stinginess, for example, generosity is probably one of your key values.
If you are especially put off by rudeness in others, it’s likely that
consideration is a high value for you. As in the other categories,
establishing rituals can help bridge the gap between the values you
aspire to and how you currently behave. If you discover that
consideration is a key value, but you are perpetually late for meetings,
the ritual might be to end the meetings you run five minutes earlier
than usual and intentionally show up five minutes early for the meeting
that follows.
Addressing these three categories helps people go a long way toward
achieving a greater sense of alignment, satisfaction, and well-being in
their lives on and off the job. Those feelings are a source of positive
energy in their own right and reinforce people’s desire to persist at
rituals in other energy dimensions as well.
This new way of working takes hold only to the degree that
organizations support their people in adopting new behaviors. We have
learned, sometimes painfully, that not all executives and companies are
prepared to embrace the notion that personal renewal for employees will
lead to better and more sustainable performance. To succeed, renewal
efforts need solid support and commitment from senior management,
beginning with the key decision maker.
At Wachovia, Susanne Svizeny, the president of the region in which we
conducted our study, was the primary cheerleader for the program. She
embraced the principles in her own life and made a series of personal
changes, including a visible commitment to building more regular renewal
rituals into her work life. Next, she took it upon herself to foster
the excitement and commitment of her leadership team. Finally, she
regularly reached out by e-mail to all participants in the project to
encourage them in their rituals and seek their feedback. It was clear to
everyone that she took the work seriously. Her enthusiasm was
infectious, and the results spoke for themselves.
At Sony Europe, several hundred leaders have embraced the principles
of energy management. Over the next year, more than 2,000 of their
direct reports will go through the energy renewal program. From Fujio
Nishida on down, it has become increasingly culturally acceptable at
Sony to take intermittent breaks, work out at midday, answer e-mail only
at designated times, and even ask colleagues who seem irritable or
impatient what stories they’re telling themselves.
Organizational support also entails shifts in policies, practices,
and cultural messages. A number of firms we worked with have built
“renewal rooms” where people can regularly go to relax and refuel.
Others offer subsidized gym memberships. In some cases, leaders
themselves gather groups of employees for midday workouts. One company
instituted a no-meeting zone between 8 and 9
am
to ensure that people had at least one hour absolutely free of
meetings. At several companies, including Sony, senior leaders
collectively agreed to stop checking e-mail during meetings as a way to
make the meetings more focused and efficient.
A number of firms have built “renewal rooms” where people can regularly go to relax and refuel.
One factor that can get in the way of success is a crisis mentality.
The optimal candidates for energy renewal programs are organizations
that are feeling enough pain to be eager for new solutions but not so
much that they’re completely overwhelmed. At one organization where we
had the active support of the CEO, the company was under intense
pressure to grow rapidly, and the senior team couldn’t tear themselves
away from their focus on immediate survival—even though taking time out
for renewal might have allowed them to be more productive at a more
sustainable level.
By contrast, the group at Ernst & Young successfully went through
the process at the height of tax season. With the permission of their
leaders, they practiced defusing negative emotions by breathing or
telling themselves different stories, and alternated highly focused
periods of work with renewal breaks. Most people in the group reported
that this busy season was the least stressful they’d ever experienced.
The implicit contract between organizations and their employees today
is that each will try to get as much from the other as they can, as
quickly as possible, and then move on without looking back. We believe
that is mutually self-defeating. Both individuals and the organizations
they work for end up depleted rather than enriched. Employees feel
increasingly beleaguered and burned out. Organizations are forced to
settle for employees who are less than fully engaged and to constantly
hire and train new people to replace those who choose to leave. We
envision a new and explicit contract that benefits all parties:
Organizations invest in their people across all dimensions of their
lives to help them build and sustain their value. Individuals respond by
bringing all their multidimensional energy wholeheartedly to work every
day. Both grow in value as a result.
