The Four Energies

There's energy in you and around you. What extra can you do to release it and harness it?

Leadership is not about making clever decisions and doing bigger deals, least of all for personal gain. In other words, it is about helping release the positive energy that exists naturally within people. Mintzberg

Co-Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy - in companies, organisations and even in families. They inspire or demoralize others first by how effectively they manage there own energy and next by how well they mobilize, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead. The skilful management of energy, individually and organisationally, makes possible something that we call Full Engagement. Loehr and Schwartz

Simply put, a leader's job is to energize others. Notice that I don't say it's part of the job; it is their job. There is no "time off" when a leader isn't responsible for energizing others. Every interaction a leader has is either going to positively energize those around them or negatively energize them. Winning leaders use the power of ideas and values to energize people. They don't win every time, but they have a very high percentage of success and they consciously work at getting better. Noel Tichy

Some leaders drain energy from people and the others create it. I want people who arrive in the morning with a smile on their faces, who are upbeat, ready to take on the tasks of the day or the month or the year. They're going to create energy, and energize the people they work with - and they're going to hire people like that too.
Larry Bossidy Close

The highest levels of creativity can be expected in those lines of endeavour that involve man's emotions, judgement, symbolising powers, aesthetic perceptions and spiritual impulses.
John Gardner Close

To involve the whole person in learning means to set the right brain free, to use it as well. The right hemisphere functions in quite a different way. It is intuitive. It grasps the essence before it understands the details. It is aesthetic rather than logical. It makes creative leaps. It is the way of the artist, of the creative scientist. It is associated with the feeling qualities of life.

Significant learning combines the logical and intuitive, the intellect and the feelings, the concept and the experience, the idea and the meaning. When we learn in that way, we are whole; we use all our masculine and feminine capacities.
Carl Rogers Close

Winning organizations do their jobs better than others. And in a highly competitive world, this means that they work faster and with greater energy. Therefore, winning leaders not only encourage people to have good ideas and develop strong values, but they also take deliberate actions to generate energy and to channel it to productive uses.

All organizations inherently have energy because they are made up of people, and people have energy. But in winning organizations, people seem to have more energy, and they certainly use it more productively. While the losers waste their energy on negative activities such as internal politics and resisting changes demanded by the marketplace, the winners use theirs positively to overcome problems and meet new challenges.

They do this because their top leaders understand that positive energy produces positive results. They use energy, like ideas and values, as a competitive tool. And they consciously work at creating positive energy in everyone else in the organization.
Noel Tichy Close