The Emerging and Unavoidable 'Real' Role of a CEO - Part 2

 Part 2 ..

 Considering we have lived through Part 1 (else click here), and successfully stepped to Part 2, implies you can take some more :) (Apologize if you accidentally came here.) 

The rest, lets dig some more, step right in and move from the frills to the drills, as they say. Hope you are ready because I am.

 Managing the energy of the Organisation

There are three key pillars driving the energy of the organisation

1. Personal Energy: Energy of the individuals within the system.
2. Organisational Energy: Energy they bring to a task as a collective
3. Business Energy: Energy coming from the purpose of  that task and its subsequent accomplishment.

Personal Energy

 Personal Energy implies the energies individuals in an organisation carry with them. While most would debate that there is no way to measure and hence manage that, at a daily basis, there are two key aspects that can help tremendously overall.   

1. Holistic understanding and management of key aspects of any individual’s life.

This implies that the person has the necessary tools to take care of his physical, mind, emotional, financial, and social among others, spaces. Any one left alone, will create a void, if not stitched, could potentially rip the system apart.

Many people at the epitome of success complain of ‘depression’. Many popular celebrities die alone from overdose of drugs. Many people at their deathbeds, want to let everything go if they could only get their health or time with their family back. Many others, regret not having made enough impact and lived their potential. Many have climbed the corporate ladder with family or relationship sacrifices or worse, moral sacrifices.

It is not that their compass wasn’t pointing to the right north. It’s more that the compass never gave them much options in the way it was crafted for them, socially or professionally, mostly in unawareness at that time, of the consequences.

    2. Understanding the role of the sub-conscious and our own unique governing patterns

Even if all was well in the world and our organisations, we would still have found a way to be unhappy in it and focus on the ‘not haves’, such is the nature of our subconscious mind.

Most organisations focus and spend a lot of their energy in ‘learning and development’ units that cater to the conscious mind – negotiation skills, communication and worse, soft skills and none to the subconscious mind – values and beliefs, pleasure and pain causals in our mind, short term gain or long term pain, fight or flight etc.

Theory of Mind by Dr Kappas shares “Conscious mind controls 12% of our decisions and actions. 88% of it is our subconscious mind”.

Knowing that we will always go back to our subconscious mind in times of toughest decisions, and not what we have acquired at a conscious level, Organisation should ideally focus more energy and money where there is more value and impact – the subconscious mind and the governing patterns. 

People from different parts of a country and the world combine to form an organisation. While on the surface they have similar technical skills and speak the same lingo, they have much diverse mind-sets and governing patterns, and in reality, different mind lingo’s and these are where the dissonances really lie. Bridging the ‘organisational mind’ gap is key to a cohesive system.

Action: Organisations need to find a way to help individuals excel in their energies by educating them on how to draft their own success story – one that is holistic and works for them and their ecosystem. They need to help them weed out the non-supportive patterns that are sabotaging the individual’s performance. While it sounds complicated, mostly because, it is new, it is actually reasonably doable. As the doctors say “A person who owns that he has a problem, is more than half way towards resolving it”

Organisational Energy

This is another good one and what is funny about this is that most people don’t know how it is different from the other two energies – personal and business. Most people confuse organisational energy for business energy. And herein, lies the clue. If you don’t even have a vocabulary for it, you are definitely not speaking that language yet.

Organisational Energy is understanding how people come together, to achieve a task. Even if personal energies are not very well aligned, but the way the organisation teaches them to come together to achieve a task could make any pastry taste good despite the sour dough.

Most organisations call it Culture, though I refrain from it here since culture mostly means myriad set of activities to keep the employees ‘engaged’ and ‘motivated’. Most of which are symptomatic treatments that hardly touch the core of the problem. Organisational Energy is much bigger. It seeps through everything and shows from everywhere: the walls, the coffee table talks, the manager’s tone, the use of power, the implicit messages, the overall sense of empowerment and the way the ‘different’ personal energies are handled through the system.

Action: Organisations can look to improve  this by setting the tone at the top, treating the energy of the company as a priority and weeding away the energy depletors, especially if they are top performers. Individual performance cannot be more important than organisational performance even though it is supportive of the business performance. With every such depletor, the chances of the ecosystem surviving in the long run become less and less.

Business Energy

Business Energy relates to what task is the organisational energy directed to. Most successful organisations are already good at this one. They mostly solve key problems and direct the world to a positive spin by adding value. Their ability to read customers and markets, deploy the right strategies and fit the right people to address the opportunity create a lot of business energy. What is imperative to mention here that if the business is one that supports the good of the world, the energy is more conducive to success and does support the other two energies tremendously. Most organisation reach a reasonable degree of success harnessing just this energy itself. To reach beyond, they need the other two as well.

Action : Organisations that have not been successful, mostly startup or mid-level companies, need to understand if a) the task at hand can inspire people; organisation without a powerful message of their existence are unable to garner alignment and b) every part of the business has been thought through and runs well. Overlapping functions, no role or growth clarity, unnecessary processes among other things are mostly at fault in hindering the business energy of the organisation.

Parting note: Most organisations have people striving in them; striving to meet professional, personal, financial, and social and relationship goals among many others. Their organisational energy is depleted by few at the top and their business energy is lacking clarity of intention. The move from a striving system to a thriving one, for all three areas, is essential to sustaining any successful environment high in energy.

 Hoping your own understanding was rewarded. Keep plugged to the energy.

 In gratitude for your time.

 Nidhi Raina

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Nidhi loves the idea of an energy rich world, especially ‘human’ energy. You can reach out to her at [email protected]. She loves to meet and talk to more energy beings!