Energy – Your Best Currency to Steer Ahead

It is crucial for leaders to understand and manage their most precious natural resource – energy. Harnessing this resource for the long term starts with realising all aspects of our lives that may affect it significantly.

With that in mind, PETRONAS Leadership Centre invited Tony Schwartz, founder & CEO of The Energy Project to speak on Optimising Leadership Resilience for Sustainability. Directly addressing the demanding lives lead by his audience, he explains that though time is finite, energy can be expanded, renewed and used more efficiently to make up our overall capacity for life. And as leaders, they play the role of Chief Energy Officers over those they lead – which includes mobilising, inspiring, and renewing people’s energy to focus on things that matter.

The Four Dimensions of Energy

Tony walked them through the four dimensions of energy; Physical, Emotional, Mental & Spiritual. Knowing the hectic days that our top leaders endure, he pressed on sleep hygiene as one of the main sources of energy, encouraging us to sleep at least 7 hours a day for optimal energy renewal. What about those mid-day slumps, usually after lunch? Tony’s a firm believer of working in sprints and listening to our body, which includes squeezing in tactical naps in the day to bring us back to our productive zone. This also applies to taking full advantage of our mental focus, where he highlighted that humans are not meant to multi-task like computers. Our ability to accomplish a task is reduced by 25% when we do this, which is leakage that we could potentially channel into more important things!

The Energy Quadrants

Ideally, we would like to be in the performance zone of our energy quadrant, but more likely than not, we are pushed into the survival zone, especially when you feel like your self-worth or value is at stake. In this case Tony reminds us that the more energy you spend defending your value, the less energy you have available to create value. Imagine this – a staff puts in the hours, though all their efforts go unnoticed, or even worse, the leader only ever picks out the mistakes that the staff does! A simple focused recognition can go a long way in keeping the staff engaged and motivated in channeling their energy to strive better at work, rather than spending that time and energy continuously doubting themselves on whether what they do actually matters.