Leadership is The Management of Energy

For many years now I’ve believe that leadership is the management of energy. This was reinforced to me when I attended a 5-Day Leadership workshop in Jakarta many years ago, under the guidance of the brilliant Rajeev Peshawaria. The greatest benefit of those 5 days, in addition to the learning, was meeting Vijay Bhat, who along with Rajeev, has been a mentor to me since then.

When it comes to leading however, we need to manage not just the energy of others, but that of ourselves as well. On Wednesday I ran a workshop for the Publicis Groupe, where it was wonderful to see the energy of the leaders in the room. One might expect a post-lunch session with 12 CEOs, 1 MD, 1 CFO and 1 Chief Talent Officer to be a laid back affair. However their level of engagement, participation and energy was inspiring. There was ZERO hesitation in physical activities, exercises and discussions in groups or pairs, and brainstorming ideas that would lead to achieving our objectives.

I’ve seen people nervous about working with such senior stakeholders. However what we often don’t realise is that it is their curiosity and ability to both learn and adapt to change, that has got them to the top. So if you’re able to offer them tangible value that is aligned to their objectives, you’ll get more enthusiastic engagement from them than probably any other group.

One of the key things to keep in mind when crafting the learning journey however, is the order in which you structure your sessions or activities. Very often we are trying to get people who are vertically incentivised to collaborate horizontally. In my experience what releases the largest amount of untapped potential for collaboration, is getting the participants to connect at a human level first.?

In a stand-up comedy act, I first chat with the audience and establish connections around the room. I then go into the safer jokes and leave the hard hitting stuff for the end. Similar in a workshop, I first try and get my participants to try and form a connect or bond with each other. Then I take them through the fun learning stuff, before finally getting down to the business end of things.

I really enjoyed working with the Publicis Team and hope to do a few more things with them going forward. A bonus of this offsite was catching up with my fellow coach Doc Marcus Ranney who has some really exciting stuff coming up, so watch this space. Another great bonus was getting to meet Arvind Gupta ji, from whom I have much to learn. I was fortunate enough to get time with Sunish and him on the flight back, where many fun stories were exchanged.?

In the photograph above are the Publicis Group workshop attendees:?Ajay Parashar, Amaresh Godbole, Amit Misra, Anupriya Acharya, Dheeraj Sinha, Jai Lala, Lalatendu Das, Paritosh Srivastava, Rathi Gangappa, Santanu Sengupta, Sejal Shah, Sunish Jose, Surbhi Gupta, Tanmay Mohanty & Unny Radhakrishnan. You can clearly see their ENERGY in the photo.

Sadly we missed Raj Deepak Das in the group photograph, but he was with us in spirit. And I was able to have a wonderful conversation with Dheeraj and him in the company of spirits later in the evening :)

QUESTIONS:

How do you define Leadership?

What’s the best Leadership Development session you’ve attended and what did you like about it?

How do you like to learn best? And if you’re a coach, what in your experience works well for you in terms of structuring sessions?

Leadership is the management of energy - agree or disagree? And why?

#Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment?#Mindfulness #ExecutiveCoach #ExecutiveCoaching #ExecutiveCoachPapaCJ #LICreatorAccelerator #Energy

The wonderful setting where we got to brainstorm :)