Managing Energies In These Times!

There is a difference between managing people and managing energies in your team. Imagine a leader in current context managing work amongst his / her team - half of whom are either recouping from illness themselves or are caregivers to family members who need attention. Clearly energies to achieve team deliverables are at lower levels however not depleted. Situation simply needs re-directing energy utilizations, optimizing resources and harnessing potential reserves. So;

1. Instead of wasting energy delving on the failure and take apart the machinery for complete overhauling, invest on the learnings from failure to simply fix the needed parts and move on with necessary precautions.

2. Instead of wanting to stick to idea of "business as usual", understand priorities, assess risks and be ok to take a hit in few areas but not at cost of urgent and critical priorities.

3. Instead of sustaining the routines, think of new ways and methods of doing things and create possibly new routines. After all, there is need to get smart in times of constraints to deliver critical priorities without compromising on basics.

4. Instead of having all hands on deck equally - Understand individual pockets of energy (skills and behaviors of people) and their workings within team - are they like "Reactors", "Capacitors", "Transformers" ? Depending on situation - be it voltage fluctuations, maintenance, supply constrains etc they will have their critical roles.

5. Instead of building contingency for fire fighting and unplanned outages; work for deliberate downtime, planned load shedding or fire drill. Keep eyes on meter readings, performance patterns and data; share critical insights and inferences for timely decisions before system collapses.

6. Re- boot yourselves from time to time. Make space for intermittent time-outs and recharge batteries.