Level of Human Energy

Boost Talent Energy.

Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel -  6/28/11

A company’s collective energy can be the fuel to fire its ambitions or the reason performance levels crash and Individuals experience the ebb and flow of different states of energy in an organization. This energy can be the fuel to make a company work, as it is a cornerstone to people’s effectiveness. Further, organizational energy is measurable and manageable.

To actively influence their organization’s energy, leaders need to understand or assess it. Second, they should boost and sustain the energy in their organization, unit or team so people are fully charged to execute business goals. To master this challenge, talent managers should provide process support for leaders.

What Is Organizational Energy?
A company’s energy reflects the extent to which an organization, division or team has mobilized its emotional, cognitive and behavioral potential to pursue shared goals. To tap into the full scope and possibilities, talent leaders need to understand three crucial attributes of organizational energy:

1. Organizational energy is collective. It comprises a company’s activated human potential. It considers the dynamics and interactions amongst people.

2. There are three components. Organizational energy comprises the activated emotional, cognitive and behavioral potential exemplified by shared enthusiasm, cognitive alertness in the company or collective effort in shared initiatives, or the lack thereof.

3. Energy is malleable. Organizational energy reflects the current state of energy activation in a company, and it’s fluid, not stable. This means it ebbs and flows more readily than the organization’s culture, and leaders actively can alter it.

Companies experience different types of organizational energy along two dimensions: Intensity, which reflects the degree to which a company has activated its potential, and quality, which describes to what extent human forces are or are not aligned with shared company goals.

Combining these two dimensions results in four different energy states, and companies typically experience, to varying extents, all four simultaneously. They are:.

• Productive energy characterized by high emotional involvement, mental alertness, high activity levels, speed and stamina.
• Comfortable energy characterized by high shared satisfaction and identification coupled with low activity levels, reduced mental alertness and organizational complacency. 
• Resigned inertia characterized by high levels of frustration, mental withdrawal and cynicism and low collective engagement.
• Corrosive energy characterized by collective aggression and destructive behavior. For example, it may manifest in internal politics, resistance to change or focused efforts to maximize individual benefits.

How to Assess and Manipulate Organizational Energy
A talent leader’s gut feeling about a company’s energy state could be accurate, but there are ways to measure it. Talent leaders can help teams analyze their profiles across the four energy states, and choose leadership strategies and instruments to improve or maintain the organization’s energy.

One tool is the organizational energy questionnaire (OEQ), a standardized survey instrument to measure and analyze companies’ energy profiles for business units, departments and teams. It is advisable to assess major energy drivers such as leadership quality simultaneously.

Talent managers can work with the OEQ in three ways. It can be a periodic employee survey, an organizational energy pulse-check — to monitor change processes — and an instant energy check in workshops with management teams. In 2005, Alstom Power Service made the OEQ part of its global employee opinion survey to detect company energy overall and in various business units and departments engaged in global and local leadership activities. Alstom nominated identity champions to facilitate workshops in divisions, business units and country organizations to work with survey results. Every unit derived managerial issues from its energy state and defined action plans around engagement and alignment. These kinds of activities allow talent leaders and line managers to identify and nurture leadership talent based on data and tackle issues based on energy profiles.

In organizations that face the complacency trap, languishing in a state of comfortable energy, or are experiencing resigned inertia, talent managers need to help leaders activate human forces. To charge the company, they can support the leadership capability to perceive either a major threat — the Slaying the Dragon strategy — or a promising opportunity — the Winning the Princess strategy.

Slaying the Dragon focuses the company’s shared emotion, mental agility and effort on overcoming an existential external threat, ultimately generating productive energy. The strategy includes three tasks and underlying leadership instruments:
• Task 1: Identifying, interpreting and defining a threat.
• Task 2: Mobilizing communication to create awareness of a common problem.? 
• Task 3: Strengthening collective confidence that the company can deal with the threat.

The Winning the Princess strategy is based on the observation that productive energy can be particularly high if companies are pursuing a special opportunity. An innovation, a developing market or a new organizational vision can release a desire for action and the positive forces in a company. The strategy works with three steps and underlying leadership tools:
• Task 1: Identifying, interpreting and defining an opportunity.
• Task 2: Passionately communicating the opportunity.
• Task 3: Strengthening people’s confidence to achieve the opportunity.

For example, Tata Steel focused on its employees in three ways during a restatement of the company’s vision. First, it engaged employees in creation of the vision. Then, it launched a comprehensive communications campaign. Finally, the company followed up with a full-blown initiative to increase employees’ commitment to the vision. As a first step, Tata Steel’s 40 top executives developed basic ideas during a two-day discussion. But CEO B. Muthuraman encouraged the entire workforce to participate. Via the corporate intranet, employees could comment on the first ideas for the vision, express their opinions, or submit their own ideas, and more.