Why you need to be more connected

Welcome one and all to season 3 of the Thriving Leader.?It is great to be back.

If you’re a seasoned reader of Thriving Leader then you’ll know by now that this thing is all about developing sustainable energy to be a fantastic leader.?? Want to improve your time management - that's great but remember you only have 24 hours in a day, you can't truly manage or create time. But you can create energy.

Using the Energy Leader model in season 1 we looked at what it takes to have good core energy, the strength and stamina to last the day, looking after body, heart, gut and mind since everything’s all connected.

Need a reminder?- here it is again

CREATIVE ENERGY

Creative energy is so important.?Many people will say “I’m not creative” or feel intimidated by creativity when they really needn’t be at all.??We learned that most of us hold dear to creativity myths – that some people are born creative and others are not (not true).?Or that creativity comes to us in a flash moment so we should just sit around and wait our turn which may or may never come, or that creativity is all about the absolutely brand new, despite us knowing that most inventions, great artwork, dance, sculpture, music and words have nearly always been inspired by someone else.

Throughout the summer that is now a distant memory, I’ve been researching and writing Season 3 which is all about connective energy.?It’s one of the four quadrants in energy leadership.

CAN TIME MANAGEMENT BRING YOU PRODUCTIVITY GAINS?

As you know if you’re a regular reader of these articles, I recognise we’re all seeking productivity gains and often “time-management” appears as the magic bullet solution for this.?Except it doesn’t work.??Let me clarify.?It works, up to a point and then the tested time-management solutions actually start to send us backwards.?Why???Two very good reasons.

Firstly – there are only 24 hours in a day.?Time cannot be managed.?We cannot invent more time.?So most time management solutions are really doing two things – eliminating things that never get done and trying to squeeze more into the available hours.

Which leads us then to the second issue with many time-management solutions that our bodies and minds are not designed or capable of running 24 hours a day.?As living organic beings, our productivity progressively diminishes the longer we drive onwards without breaks.?We may try to avoid this reality in the short term through stimulants be they sugar, caffeine or things that create more serious concern and when it hurts we then introduce more drugs to ease the pain.?These are not sustainable approaches and they are today’s workplace silent killers.

HOW CONNECTIVE ENERGY BEATS TIME MANAGEMENT

Energy is different to time.?We can control and manage our energy levels and amazingly we can actually create more energy both in ourselves and in others.?Season 3 is all about Connective Energy.?Connective energy is about combining our energy with that of others for more explosive effect.??Kind of one plus one equals much more than three.

How’s it work???Well in simple terms it’s about bringing together people with similar aspirations but different skills and tools and contacts.?It’s about bringing together contrasting ideas for new ones to be forged but essentially it is about bringing people together through a desire to be there, not because you pay or control them to do your bidding.?It is subtly difficult but when you get it going it can lead to amazing unexpected results.

We’re not all naturally geared up for Connective Energy and so to illustrate here’s an example of three different types of people, see which you recognise in yourself.

LET'S MEET SAM - THE TIME MANAGEMENT COMMAND & CONTROL GOT IT ALL COVERED KINDA LEADER

Meet Sam, an experienced leader who has a knack for remembering who she has delegated tasks to and when they should have them done by.?Everyone in Sam’s team knows if she’s given something to you she will never forget.?Sam was raised on “command and control”, her day is setting tasks and holding people to account.??

One day Sam was unusually ill and couldn’t come in to work.??What happened to Sam’s team in her absence??Not a lot.?No-one knew what everyone else was doing because Sam held all the cards, no-one knew how to work with someone else because Sam always built the teams and no-one felt they could change things because Sam called all the shots.??

Sam held all the energy, until she couldn’t.

LET'S MEET JIM - THE LEAD BY EXAMPLE TASK MASTER WITH SUPER HIGH STANDARDS

Next door sits Jim – a proudly hard task-master who holds high standards and when things go wrong will roll his sleeves up and get stuck in. He sees this as being supportive of his team in a crisis.??When Jim shows them how to do it, his team feel like little children and not in a good way.

Sam and Jim have excellent people on their team but lately have started to lose them.?Jim says their success is because he invested in showing them how to do things well.?Sam says likewise.??

When the staff were interviewed by HR on their exit out of the company they said they quite liked their jobs but they felt stifled and unable to grow – at best they felt they used less than 50% of their available skills because Sam needed control and Jim’s high standards prevented anyone trying something he’d never done before.

LET'S MEET LISA, THE CONNECTOR

Sam and Jim needed to have met Lisa.?Lisa holds a different notion of team.?She has a formal team she is responsible for.?She sees these people not as folk who need to be given direction and controlled but as a body of knowledge and skills.?

She can’t be everywhere at once so she sees everyone as a disciple and agent in the world bringing back insight and connections to the tribe.?The person leading an initiative in Lisa’s team is the best person at that time.?

Lisa builds coalitions within and outside the organisation.?She instils in her team a desire to seek out and find people with common interests in different circumstances, discovering, learning, making connections and trusting it'll intuitively someday lead o something good.

Lisa joins dots between people and knowledge and as a result her presence and impact is significantly more than the 24 hours a day she’s on this planet.?Lisa is adept at using Connective energy, the skill of identifying commonality, traits of interest, enthusing others to pick up a baton, inspiring others to be curious or have the confidence to try something new, creating followers based on not on a personality but coalitions of people who share a common interest, curiosity or purpose.?

At any stage Lisa is benefitting from the insight, wisdom and energy not just of her team but a whole network and range of people within and beyond her company.

AND HERE'S THE THING

-???????People love working with the Lisa’s of this world more than Jim and Sam.?Connectors have a kind of magnetism, people love working with them and those people bring others with them too.? It's more than followership. They are attractors. They attract the energy of others who bring it willingly to see interesting things happen

-???????Even Sam and Jim can learn to be like Lisa, to trust others, let go a little, be more curious, have more faith in others’ talents and skills than believing themselves to be superior, ceding power, sharing the limelight, feeling the thrill of someone’s else’s achievement not being daunted by an auditious goal just because they don’t have the resource they feel they need.

THIS IS FOR YOU

Leaders who are able to summon connective energy hold around them a quantum of skill, resource, ideas, activity and unlike Sam and Jim, they’re often working with people who aren’t even on their payroll.?It takes certain skills, a generosity of spirit to be a connective leader but the value that’s created for those efforts is worth it.

Welcome to season 3.??With any good season we’re starting off with the basics of connecting with people.?We then start to look at what it takes to generate goodwill in people we can’t just shout at and command.??We look at networking for the non- networkers, honesty in relationships and seeing is believing.?As we’re all a little different, I’ve written some episodes on how introverts and extroverts do connective energy and exploring male and female approaches to connective energy.?

And as the season moves to an end I take a look at advocates and detractors and how you can generate connective energy even inside your organisation.?And we finish off with some thoughts on LinkedIn which is how many of you find these articles and the podcast and how you can make it work for you.

We’re covering a lot of ground.?Ready to hone those connective energy skills, welcome to Season 3 of Thriving Leader.

In my coaching world I help introverts and quieter folk to figure out where their strengths lie and leverage them so they succeed in a world designed for and often by extroverts. I call it a Quietly Successful Career - with all the ambition, just a little less noise.

Discover lots of articles just like this, podcasts to develop yourself for free and how to fire up your quietly successful career at www.ianbrowne.com