BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 137
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time •• •M ANAGING Y OURSELF
The rituals and behaviors Wanner established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and
gave up drinking, which had disrupted his
sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up
he felt more rested and more motivated to
exercise, which he now does almost every
morning. In less than two months he lost 15
pounds. After working out he now sits down
with his family for breakfast. Wanner still
puts in long hours on the job, but he renews
himself regularly along the way. He leaves his
desk for lunch and usually takes a morning
and an afternoon walk outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better able to connect with his wife
and children.
Establishing simple rituals like these can
lead to striking results across organizations.
At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of employees through a pilot energy management
program and then measured their performance against that of a control group. The
participants outperformed the controls on a
series of financial metrics, such as the value
of loans they generated. They also reported
substantial improvements in their customer
relationships, their engagement with work,
and their personal satisfaction. In this article,
we’ll describe the Wachovia study in a little
more detail. Then we’ll explain what executives and managers can do to increase and
regularly renew work capacity—the approach
used by the Energy Project, which builds on,
deepens, and extends several core concepts
developed by Tony’s former partner Jim
Loehr in his seminal work with athletes.
Linking Capacity and Performance
at Wachovia
Tony Schwartz (tony@theenergyproject
.com) is the president and founder of
the Energy Project in New York City,
and a coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time,
Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (Free Press, 2003).
Catherine McCarthy (catherine@
theenergyproject.com) is a senior vice
president at the Energy Project.
Most large organizations invest in developing
employees’ skills, knowledge, and competence. Very few help build and sustain their
capacity—their energy—which is typically
taken for granted. In fact, greater capacity
makes it possible to get more done in less
time at a higher level of engagement and
with more sustainability. Our experience at
Wachovia bore this out.
In early 2006 we took 106 employees at 12
regional banks in southern New Jersey
through a curriculum of four modules, each
of which focused on specific strategies for
strengthening one of the four main dimen-
harvard business review • october 2007
sions of energy. We delivered it at one-month
intervals to groups of approximately 20 to 25,
ranging from senior leaders to lower-level
managers. We also assigned each attendee a
fellow employee as a source of support between sessions. Using Wachovia’s own key
performance metrics, we evaluated how the
participant group performed compared with
a group of employees at similar levels at a
nearby set of Wachovia banks who did not go
through the training. To create a credible
basis for comparison, we looked at year-overyear percentage changes in performance
across several metrics.
On a measure called the “Big 3”—revenues
from three kinds of loans—the participants
showed a year-over-year increase that was 13
percentage points greater than the control
group’s in the first three months of our study.
On revenues from deposits, the participants
exceeded the control group’s year-over-year
gain by 20 percentage points during that
same period. The precise gains varied month
by month, but with only a handful of exceptions, the participants continued to significantly outperform the control group for a full
year after completing the program. Although
other variables undoubtedly influenced these
outcomes, the participants’ superior performance was notable in its consistency. (See the
exhibit “How Energy Renewal Programs
Boosted Productivity at Wachovia.”)
We also asked participants how the program influenced them personally. Sixty-eight
percent reported that it had a positive impact
on their relationships with clients and customers. Seventy-one percent said that it had
a noticeable or substantial positive impact on
their productivity and performance. These
findings corroborated a raft of anecdotal evidence we’ve gathered about the effectiveness
of this approach among leaders at other large
companies such as Ernst & Young, Sony,
Deutsche Bank, Nokia, ING Direct, Ford, and
MasterCard.
The Body: Physical Energy
Our program begins by focusing on physical
energy. It is scarcely news that inadequate
nutrition, exercise, sleep, and rest diminish
people’s basic energy levels, as well as their
ability to manage their emotions and focus
their attention. Nonetheless, many executives
don’t find ways to practice consistently
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