The Manager as an Energy Coach

One of the strongest leadership tools that you can leverage as a manager is cultivating a coach:athlete relationship with your team. Ideally established from the onboarding process, and reinforced with each of your reports regularly, you make it clear that you are not there as their professor, parent, nor as an almighty judge.

“Think of me as your coach”

Rather than solely being focused on overseeing the processes and procedures of the day, you wear the hat of providing guidance and support that develops your reports into reaching their true career potential.

Your direct reports see themselves as athletes, and know that if they are struggling, you, as their coach, are the best person to approach for career advice.

As the coach, if you’re looking to cultivate exceptional work performance from your team, you choose to focus on the single most important factor that drives it: their energy level.

For this, you work on getting them into the zone — the energy zone.

Energy zones are the behavioral hubs (also known as the chakras) within the human body. Each zone holds distinct talents, strengths, and thematic usage in our lives. If the energy zones of your team are healthy and know how to perform sharply, they become an undeniable competitive advantage for your business, and for your employee’s career development.

Across these 9 zones you’ll find talented skills that range from ideation and focus, to confident self-expression, to zones that can be used to muster up stronger levels of productivity, willpower, and teamwork.

These zones don’t exist in just some people: your team has them all. The question is: are you coaching them on how to tap in?

This edition of The Energy Papers: Work Edit is here to teach you how.

CHALLENGE: Your company is undergoing a great deal of change management (think: mass layoffs, organization restructure, senior leadership turnover)

SOLUTION: Strengthen your team’s Spleen Zone.

In times of major company change and job uncertainty, the future grows blurry and your team’s trust levels will begin to drop. The perceived danger, ambiguity, and confusion sparks their innermost survival fears to come out: What could go wrong in this situation, and what could happen to me? How will this affect my standing within the firm? If my pay changes, will I be able to afford my rent and bills this month? And whose side is my manager on in this situation, anyway?

The Spleen Zone is home to these survival-based fears, along with our immune system and intuition. When the Spleen Zone is triggered by concerns in the workplace (whether real or imagined) your team’s nervous system will begin to disregulate as they enter into self-protection and defense mode. This can look like an increase in friction, complaining, and aggressive team interactions as people feel more on edge; individuals starting to shut down and procrastinate, leading to a drop in engagement; or people ‘yes-manning’ you to death in an effort to avoid conflict or saying anything that could threaten their sense of job security.

Change management is never easy to deal with, but it is a time that requires you to step up as a proactive communicator like never before in order to take control of the information, potential rumors, and emotions that will circulate across your team.

What this looks like in practice: If your team understands what is coming, it makes all the difference in their ability to roll with the punches. To do so, they need to understand that this change management process is a journey and while things may look bleak right now, there is another side to this situation that will eventually be reached.

Price Pritchett, a Change Management and High Performance expert, talks about this on the School of Greatness Podcast as leveling with your employees. Acknowledge to them upfront that this process is “going to be painful, messy, and we are going to make some mistakes. But we need to do this, and this is what it’s going to look like.” Next, paint a picture of what the brighter future looks like for the company when you all get through this tough time.

Pritchett encourages you to think of yourself as a doctor who is responsible for making your patients (i.e. your team) well again. If a patient were going in for surgery, the doctor would explain what they could expect from the process step-by-step, (e.g. “First, the anesthesiologist will come in.. and “you won’t feel as bad next week as you do on day two of recovery”)

It is from your proactive communication that your credibility during this tough time will go through the roof, as your team’s fears begin to diminish. Change management is a tough enough process to endure — taking the steps to strengthen your team’s Spleen Zone performance helps to prevent the situation from becoming an overwhelming distraction as you attempt to get work done.

CHALLENGE: Your team is feeling the pressure to perform and stress levels are at an all time high.

SOLUTION: Teach your team the importance of tapping into their Root Zone.

When in the Root Zone, your team is able to access high levels of drive and take bold action to push forward the projects that matter most. They have fuel and momentum to get through even the most difficult of business challenges.

The Root Zone is home to the adrenal glands and stress hormones, such as cortisol. While extreme levels of stress can be detrimental, a healthy dose of stress and pressure on your team is usually necessary to push them to persist onwards and accomplish lofty goals. The key is ensuring that they know how to manage their stress and use it for their benefit, rather than pushing themselves into states of burnout and exhaustion.

What this looks like in practice: The ability to manage a stressful work environment comes down to your team prioritizing cycles of rest and recharge. Stress only becomes a detriment when the body isn’t given an adequate chance to replenish itself. During 1:1 meetings with your direct reports, ask check-in questions such as the following to offer support in ensuring that they have a wellness routine in place that allows them to operate at the levels of performance required to be successful on your team:

• How have you been managing your workload and any feelings of overwhelm?
• Have you been taking the opportunity to take breaks, walks, and get fresh air throughout the work day?
• Are there any self-care activities or routines that you’ve found helpful to maintain a healthy sense of work-life harmony recently?
• Are you getting enough rest and sleep each night?

Asking these questions demonstrates to your team that you prioritize their well-being, and hold it as a standard expectation for them to achieve their goals. Offer them advice on how you’ve approached stress management throughout your career journey, or suggest helpful podcasts and articles that can help them tackle particular issues that they are facing when it comes to the topic.

The Root Zone performs best when life offers a healthy balance of hard work, rest, and fun, so consider how you can implement team traditions that bring a sense of lightness into the day, and prioritize team activities and events that allow for people to build stronger relationships with one another as they blow off steam.

CHALLENGE: Team engagement is low and your retention rate is suffering.

SOLUTION: Get your team into their Identity Zone.

The average person will spend over 90,000 hours working throughout their lifetime, a whopping 1/3 of our lives. In our post-pandemic world, more than ever, people have begun looking for all those hours worked to be well spent on projects, tasks and responsibilities that bring them a greater sense of fulfillment and purpose.

If your team is tapped into their Identity Zone, they have a strong sense of who they authentically are and the direction that they are headed. They hold a career vision that is rooted in their values and is in integrity with the unique person that they are. They have a sense of the higher purpose they are working toward in their career journey, and understand how their time within your organization is helping them on the path toward achieving those goals.

What this looks like in practice: As a manager, you are responsible for the career development of your employees — and your employees are yearning to be developed. This looks like ensuring that you are taking time on a quarterly basis to assist your reports in self-reflection around the “why” behind their goals, their work interests, and the future career vision that they are crafting for themselves. These developmental questions may sound like:

• What values matter most to you? How do you embody these values day to day in your role? What is keeping you from aligning with them regularly?
• What have been some of your greatest work trials, tribulations, and victories? What can you learn from them? If your career were a story, what would the running plot line of it be?
• What topics and interests do you typically find your curiosity leading you to? What tasks and projects have you enjoyed doing the most on the team, and which do you aspire toward getting your hands in overtime?
• What does the best possible version of your career self look like in 6, 12, and 24 months from now? What career wins are you hoping to achieve and what commitments are you willing to make to yourself to get there?

Spending time with your team on these exercises helps boost their engagement, performance, and allows you to have a better understanding of what career paths and project assignments that each individual on your team may be able to grow into overtime.

As a manager, think of every day in office as game day, as you embody the mantras of Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights:

• CLEAR EYES: as you keep your team keenly focused on the greater goal ahead.
• FULL HEART: as you fiercely dedicate yourself to keeping team spirit high.
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