BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 142
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time •• •M ANAGING Y OURSELF
health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their
daily behaviors.
When you’re attempting to discover what
you do best and what you enjoy most, it’s important to realize that these two things aren’t
necessarily mutually inclusive. You may get
lots of positive feedback about something
you’re very good at but not truly enjoy it.
Conversely, you can love doing something
but have no gift for it, so that achieving success requires much more energy than it
makes sense to invest.
To help program participants discover their
areas of strength, we ask them to recall at
least two work experiences in the past several
months during which they found themselves
in their “sweet spot”—feeling effective, effortlessly absorbed, inspired, and fulfilled. Then
we have them deconstruct those experiences
to understand precisely what energized them
so positively and what specific talents they
were drawing on. If leading strategy feels like
a sweet spot, for example, is it being in charge
that’s most invigorating or participating in a
creative endeavor? Or is it using a skill that
comes to you easily and so feels good to exercise? Finally, we have people establish a ritual
that will encourage them to do more of exactly that kind of activity at work.
A senior leader we worked with realized
that one of the activities he least liked was
reading and summarizing detailed sales reports, whereas one of his favorites was brainstorming new strategies. The leader found a
direct report who loved immersing himself
in numbers and delegated the sales report
task to him—happily settling for brief oral
summaries from him each day. The leader
also began scheduling a free-form 90-minute
strategy session every other week with the
most creative people in his group.
In the second category, devoting time and
energy to what’s important to you, there is
often a similar divide between what people say
is important and what they actually do. Rituals
can help close this gap. When Jean Luc Duquesne, the Sony Europe vice president,
thought hard about his personal priorities, he
realized that spending time with his family was
what mattered most to him, but it often got
squeezed out of his day. So he instituted a ritual in which he switches off for at least three
hours every evening when he gets home, so he
harvard business review • october 2007
can focus on his family. “I’m still not an expert
on PlayStation,” he told us, “but according to
my youngest son, I’m learning and I’m a good
student.” Steve Wanner, who used to talk on
the cell phone all the way to his front door on
his commute home, has chosen a specific spot
20 minutes from his house where he ends
whatever call he’s on and puts away the phone.
He spends the rest of his commute relaxing so
that when he does arrive home, he’s less preoccupied with work and more available to his
wife and children.
The third category, practicing your core values in your everyday behavior, is a challenge
for many as well. Most people are living at
such a furious pace that they rarely stop to ask
themselves what they stand for and who they
want to be. As a consequence, they let external
demands dictate their actions.
We don’t suggest that people explicitly
define their values, because the results are
usually too predictable. Instead, we seek to
uncover them, in part by asking questions that
are inadvertently revealing, such as, “What are
the qualities that you find most off-putting
when you see them in others?” By describing
what they can’t stand, people unintentionally
divulge what they stand for. If you are very
offended by stinginess, for example, generosity
is probably one of your key values. If you are
especially put off by rudeness in others, it’s
likely that consideration is a high value for
you. As in the other categories, establishing
rituals can help bridge the gap between the
values you aspire to and how you currently
behave. If you discover that consideration is a
key value, but you are perpetually late for
meetings, the ritual might be to end the meetings you run five minutes earlier than usual
and intentionally show up five minutes early
for the meeting that follows.
Addressing these three categories helps
people go a long way toward achieving a
greater sense of alignment, satisfaction, and
well-being in their lives on and off the job.
Those feelings are a source of positive energy
in their own right and reinforce people’s desire to persist at rituals in other energy dimensions as well.
•••
This new way of working takes hold only to
the degree that organizations support their
people in adopting new behaviors. We have
learned, sometimes painfully, that not all ex-
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