On Energy
Fri, Jun 16, 2023 6:38AM • 28:50
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
energy, coaches, people, team, leaders, create, talking, conversations, gavin, disruption, athletes, organization, research, sense, great, drained, oxford, feel, day, jim
SPEAKERS
Heyneke Meyer, Rikard Grip, Becky Burleigh, Paul Barnett, Gavin Weeks, Jim Woolfrey
Paul Barnett 00:00
Dr. Gavin weeks. Good morning, and welcome back to the great coaches podcast.
Gavin Weeks 00:06
We'll be back for a while the
Paul Barnett 00:08
response to the last time we had you on talking about purpose was so great, we were able to twist your arm to coming back on again. So thank you very much for that. And Gavin, today, we're going to be talking about energy, given the research that you've just been doing in the paper that you've published. But before we get into that, something really simple to begin with. Could you tell us where you are in the world and what you've been up to so far today,
Gavin Weeks 00:34
I am in Windsor in the UK for the international listeners not too far away from Heathrow Heathrow Airport. For royal followers, once I'm home of the of the Queen, sometimes of the King of England. It is dreary is rainy, probably ironic to topical energies. It's early in the morning, that kids woke up in the night. And so it's quite early, just enough time for a for a coffee. I'm not somebody who gets up at the crack of dawn and exercises. I do mine later in the later in the day. So this is my first. This is my first real bit of thinking for the morning.
Paul Barnett 01:15
Well, I'm glad that we could have your first bit of real thinking for the morning. And I'm going to start with Well, I think it's a relatively simple question. But I could be mistaken. Gavin, we hear all the time about energy. He's got good energy, that person's got bad energy, the team's got good energy. What is human energy?
Gavin Weeks 01:36
Well, I think Paul, in your in your question, you touching on actually how often that term is used to describe to describe different things. Sometimes you're talking there about people's enthusiasm. Sometimes you're talking there about elements of their personality that make somebody good to be around or potentially challenging to be around. But at least my thinking around energy. And the work that we've been doing we've been doing recently is is really focused on on two things, one physical resource that we have. So our capability to actually do work, which is something which is interesting, new, both renewable, we go to sleep everyday tired, and we wake up in the morning, hopefully rejuvenated, but at the same time, a resource that depletes over time. And one of the driving interests from energy from that perspective is is just if you look at the figures, one burnouts in, at least in the in the organizational world, there's some studies and research put around 40 4040 plus percent, that says that actually, sustaining energy is a real is a real challenge for people at the moment. The second way I think energy is interesting, or the way I think about it is more subjective, perhaps more of a psychological element in research, the term subjective vitality is used. But that's, that's my feeling of being energized, which relates, I think, to topics like engagement, to motivation, to enthusiasm, to a degree to do a degree of vigor that might rub off on other people, which may be maybe is a reason why, as you say, some people get described as having good energy or having or having negative energy.
Paul Barnett 03:24
And Gavin, what role did leaders play in generating energy?
Gavin Weeks 03:29
Well, if you answer like a physicist, which clearly are not, energy, energy isn't generated. It's just transferred from one thing to another. And actually, I think that's quite an interesting perspective. Because if as a leader, I think my role is to is to is to create energy, or make other people feel energized. Maybe I'm going to end up doing an awful lot of work and not trust that actually people have that capability within themselves. So I would tend to think of late the leaders role, being to galvanize and to harness and to channel the energy of a team into the tasks or responsibilities that they have, and to ensure that as as little energy as possible, is drained into either worthless activity, frustrating activity, or sort of contradictory activity. So there's unique the leaders role in a way is to channel the energy of of their people, or to help them challenge it.
Paul Barnett 04:40
Also, today, we've got my co host on the podcast, Jim Woolfrey. Here Hello, Jim.
Jim Woolfrey 04:47
Hi, Paul. It's good to be here on the other side of the microphone this time.
Paul Barnett 04:53
Jim, what did the great coaches say when it comes to talking about the part that energy plays in there? Leadership.
Jim Woolfrey 05:02
Your energy comes up with our interview guests often when talking about what they do to ensure that they have the energy needed to lead their programs. And there's a great example of why this is so important from the University of Florida soccer coach Beck Burley, where she talks about nothing being as valuable to the team than her best energy.
Becky Burleigh 05:26
Well, first, I think that I was blessed with a strong capacity to work. I mean, even when I was in college, I played two sports, I held, I think three or four jobs at the same time. And so I think I'm a good manager of my time. But I also think it goes back to a little bit more of like the compartmentalization part. I don't carry work home, maybe I do sometimes. But I think as a whole, I think I do a pretty good job with that. And I think I am, I don't need a lot to refresh, I kind of know what I need to refresh and I don't need much, but I do need some, and I recognize when I need it. And when I need it, I take it. That might be something as simple as you know, taking the dogs for a walk. But it also might be just, you know, going to see a concert or something that checks me out of whatever my day to day stress is. And I think so many of us feel like, okay, well, we have so much to do, we can't take that time. And the way I've always looked at that is, if I don't bring my best energy to my team, like there's nothing more valuable, there's no task that needs to get done, that's more valuable than me bringing my best energy to my team. And so I I've found a way to, I guess, wrap that around in my mind that if that means me getting fresher is going to be better for my team. And it means I don't get to do a task, I have no issue with that whatsoever.
Paul Barnett 06:52
Gavin, if I can come back to you. Now, what I'd like to know is based on your research, what can a leader do, or rather not do so that they don't negatively impact the energy within a team.
Gavin Weeks 07:09
So if if, as a leader, I know that people need a sense of autonomy, a sense of a sense of choice in the work that they do. Well, I really better not be a dictator. I've already been not create an environment where people don't make choices, where people don't make decisions as to where they focus their efforts, whether it's during a given day, or, or on a sports pitch. If I create a team of no automata that only do the things that they've been told to do, and don't make decisions on, you know, on the field, I'm probably not going to get the best out of them. But I'm also not going to be going to be promoting that sense of that sense of autonomy. I also positively I want to create an environment where people can connect, you and I have colleagues and friends Tracy and Tracy Cavalera and Sam Rocky, who are my who my business partners have just written a book called The social brain with a with a professor called Robin Dunbar and lots of that work is around how do you create environments where people can feel connection, and where people can feel a sense of belonging. So in terms of the ingredients that make up that make up teams, those things are crucial. So if I want people to feel a sense of of connectedness, or better create an environment where they can genuinely connect with each other, not in a superficial way, you know, we turn up to the to work or we turn up to the practice field, and we just make some small talk or we or we share some jokes, but in a in a deeper way that I feel like I really get to know my teammates. And then the final piece competence or or mastery. I think I mean, think in a way this runs through coaches, doesn't it the idea that I'm going to help people to become better than they are, and the thing they've chosen to focus their their attention on. But I think many people have I have examples of managers or coaches who kind of did the opposite, who made them feel like they were getting worse. They were so critical in their communication, always that they only pointed out the things that they were doing badly and didn't have conversations about the things that they did the thing that they did really well or didn't have conversations about their their the progress that they were able to they were able to see
Paul Barnett 09:35
even through your research and your work in the corporate sector. Are you able to identify critical moments when the leaders energy can make a big difference?
Gavin Weeks 09:52
I mean, I haven't I haven't done sort of the work that shows in the exact moment. But what I can stay. And this This probably is more related to not sports coaching, but exact coaching kind of work, that when I, when I see people who are emotionally drained and physically drained, they're the trigger for them is often not always but often the effect that that was having on their on their team. So a leaders exhaustion, or frustration or irritability, suddenly being noticed by members of a team in a way that it wasn't before suddenly being seen as being more critical as less encouraging, as less interested in the work that they were that they were doing. And when that feedback starts to start to emerge, or even worse when when an actual issue happens, where there's a real moment of extreme frustration, say, and that's often a trigger for people to say, well, I need to think about this and more. One really interesting thing in the in the research that you that you've already mentioned, that we that we did with some, one of the leaders that we spoke to, they'd all been members of a of a leadership program that I work on at the business school in Oxford, said, you know, what, during the pandemic's this is going back a couple of couple of years now, I thought that I was showing up with a real enthusiasm. And, you know, I thought I was being the, you know, effectively the cheerleader for my for my team. And I realized that people saw right through it, I realized that people could see that I was just drained, uninspired, not really fully, fully engaged. And for him, that was a turning point to say, I actually really need to think about the way that I'm feeling and not just putting on the face of somebody who is fully, fully charged.
Paul Barnett 12:03
I'm sure we've all put on that face at times Gavin, and for sure, I've been one of those people as well. But, Jim, from the great coaches we've interviewed Do we have any examples of them talking about the energy that their athletes or their teams expect of them?
Jim Woolfrey 12:21
We do. And probably the best example, comes from Ricard grip, who was the national coach of the Swedish cross country skiing team between 2010 and 2019. And at the age of 32, he led the national team to their best performance ever, at the 2014 Winter Olympics, where they finished equal top on the middle table with Norway, winning 11 medals. And in our interview with him, he talked about what athletes told him they wanted from their coaches, it's a great quote. So let's have a listen.
Rikard Grip 12:54
For me, it's really important for the coaches to meet the athletes where they are. And what I mean with that is, we have to meet athletes, if they are in the age, it's Ageng. Or if it's a little bit older, and what they have our own experience. For me, it's always that you should try to work together with athletes, that means some of them, you might show me the way a little bit more, someone asks you a bit more adverse, what they should do give them opportunity to choose which kind of rope they should go for. So it depends a lot and all but the main thing, and the most important is that they are into the job, really focus and give a lot of energy. So the athletes feel like they have horses that had big knowledge. But for sure, the most important part is that I give lots of energy to the athletes. And I did actually after or before, as you said, I have worked for nine years in a team, the first three years, I was working as a coach or head coach for the ladies. And after that I took over their headquarters position, also the team manager for both lights and man, that was 1011 month before Sochi. And I have a white paper. And my boss said that you have a fantastic opportunity to build your own team. And I thought that was really nice opportunity. But quite fast. I realized that it's not so easy to build a team, and also have all this pressure from media fans, everyone that feel like okay, it's only like 1110 miles to the Olympics, and you'd even have an organization. So that was a little bit stressful. But when I asked to athletes, all of them was talking about the passion, the energy from the coaches, that was the main thing when I asked them what they want from the coaches. There was the passion and the energy to the job.
Paul Barnett 14:44
Kevin, one interesting finding in your research was the value of disruption when it comes to generating energy, and indeed innovation. I was wondering if you could just expand on this a little bit because it was not it wasn't Main point in the research but I found it absolutely fascinating.
Gavin Weeks 15:05
So let me give you some a bit more context about the the the program and the people who come on the, on the program who were interviewed as part of that of that research. So it's a it's a program at the University in Oxford, that runs for a week, where people who are usually very senior in organizations, whether that's in the private sector, or the or the public sector, arrive on a Sunday, stay in a in a kind of campus all the way through to Friday afternoon, and usually turn up having had an incredibly busy time, shoehorning lots of work in, so that they can create some space in their in their diaries. And during that week, we do a combination of really interesting and provocative speakers experiences. So you're as likely you're as likely to hear somebody talking about historical research as you are to be in a in a chapel conducting, conducting acquire, never having done so in your life before. Lots of time for reflection, whether that's in conversation with with peers, or whether that's in in the tutor groups that we that we were on, we were in small groups of about six people. And we're really digging into the leadership challenge that people have brought with them on the on the program, we go outside into into nature, we use the buildings of Oxford, as well as their as well as the specific business school. And you have an interesting thing happen, which is when people who turn up in a pretty tired on to day one feel like they come alive during the course of the of the week. And one of the the interviewees that we that we spoke to said, it's a really interesting thing for me, because the whole experience just I think he used the word shuffled me. And just, it just created a sort of reverberation inside of me that I couldn't quite couldn't quite explain. And for me, this shows something really interesting about that subjective sense of energy. Because we often experience it when we're doing something which is a little outside of our of our norm, which is, either because it's looking at the world from a completely different way than we used to, or that it's slightly outside of outside of our comfort zone. So you have this relationship between that disruption. And I think it was, I can't remember the innovation writer. So I'm not going to try and I'm not gonna try to pull out a name, but talked about creative disruption. So there's that sense of, of deliberately challenging myself to think about things differently. But that in a way, goes hand in hand with a real sense of purpose. Because if it in that, in that small example I gave of the of the week of learning. If those leadership's if those leaders were doing something they just didn't actually care about, they didn't care about the organization's they didn't care about their role, they weren't interested in the content, then that disruption would have been would have been useless. So it's when we do something which is both disruptive, but also connected to something that really matters to us. That can be a really real stimulant for subjective sense of energy.
Paul Barnett 18:32
I love it. It sounds it sounds totally fascinating. And I wish I could go to Oxford to experience it. But Gavin, there's people listening who can't afford to go away for a week, what could they do with their normal routines during the week to get this same sense of disruption?
Gavin Weeks 18:52
Well, I mean, I think the advantage here is that many of us find that we we live quite retained lives. If you if you are busy with a with a job and responsibilities with family life, with with trying to do the basics of keeping yourself fit and healthy that we've we've sort of touched on already. It's very easy to fall into the same to the same pattern. So you switch off from all of that with the same kind of kind of show that you might watch watch on Netflix afterwards. Or you pick up the same day, you know, the same books by the same authors that you've that you've read. I had a lovely example yesterday of doing some coaching work with with somebody in the States. And they said to me, you're gonna laugh about this and bear in mind this person is a very senior in an organization in a business. Who is interested in jazz, a real reader, very thoughtful person. said, I've taken up hip hop dancing He said, The great thing is, I don't know how to do it again, my wife knows a little bit more than me. I'm clueless. And we turn up. And every week, it reminds me that you don't have to fall into the same routine. There's nothing about hitting my age or my seniority that says, you're going to carry on doing the same things for the rest of your rest of your life. And I think so. So that's just a nice example of saying that there's something really leftfield that I'm quite interested in, let me give it a go. And that could be as simple as picking up a different book by a different type of author that you haven't read before you always read crime fiction, well go read some science fiction or some fantasy, you always read nonfiction business books, will go read a very long, long history of ancient Greece, we living in a time when we have almost limitless availability of great writing, arts, sports. It's just a case of disrupting our routine a bit.
Paul Barnett 21:11
So, Gavin, after doing this research after working with leaders at Oxford and coaching people, all around the world, what is it you think the best leaders do differently when it comes to channeling? Or as you said earlier, transferring energy?
Gavin Weeks 21:33
Good question, Paul. I think I actually think the first thing that good leaders do around this is that they, they talk about it. So they talk about how feeling and maybe this is this is broader than energy out towards as a general sense of well being they make it something which is important to them as a leader of the other group, to the organization as a place that wants to have sustainable performance. And they start up conversations, which is around what's making you what's giving you that sense of energy at the moment, what's draining your energy, and not just talk about it. But notice the things that we can change, and we can respond to. So everybody in the team is exhausted by the fact that we have four meetings that people think could just be one, when they experiment with it, that's another way of creating some disruption is canceling those three other meetings and doing doing the one and seeing and seeing what happens. And another thing is, it's kind of I think, I think, going back a little bit in our conversation, it's, it's recognizing actually, that you're not really creating energy, you're not the sort of center of the organizational solar system. You're there to help challenge you're there to help create an environment where people can be energized, where they can experience vitality and and well being. And therefore you're much more likely to be having conversations around the around the sides of your team, then standing in the middle of giving the great motivational speech. And we've those of us who have been in, in sports teams, or in other types of organizations that are focused on high performance know that there are moments when the head coach or a leader has to has to step in, and has to give that you know, has to give that rousing speech as the bring everybody together. It might be because we've we hitting a moment where we've got to play somebody who everyone thinks we're going to lose to, or where there's been some there's been some fractures in the team. And somebody's got to bring everyone together again and remind us why we're here. But there's a difference between having done the work to ask the question about why we're here. And then the coach reminding people than the coach stepping in the middle and telling people why we're why we're here. So it's seeing yourself as being a person that can help to create an environment where people can be can be energized. Think it's thinking about the environments that you that you create, that allow for people to we were talking earlier about connection and relating that back to, to my colleagues work that both the physical environments, but also the working environments that you that you create, can help people to come together can give people the time and space, to share conversation, to share meals to sit to sit together and work on problems together. In our in our research, we referenced a study which is about shared attention and how that can create a sense of energy. So when you when you when you find when you've got people together really trying to solve an interesting problem. If you could, at the moment, measure their energy, their sense, their subjective, probably and also their physical energy, you'd find that there was an there was an improvement. So create environments where people can do things and solve things too together. Another thing is having really clear principles for managing energy, particularly as it relates to workload. And doing some work with an organization at the moment. Who are leaders in their in their field? They're what you would describe as a high performing place to do well, financially people do people do well there in terms of growing their careers. But they actually have quite a strong ethos around workload. So they have as many organizations do core hours of, let's say, nine in the morning till 530 or so in the in the evening. And when senior people see somebody working beyond those, whether it's online, or whether it's in the office, they'll they'll have a conversation with them about are you keeping up? Are you managing? Is there anything that I could do? What What can we deprioritize so that you can get finished, you can get done, and you can go and recover, refresh, spend time with family, whatever else that you need to do. And they do that habitually. It's very different from other kinds of organizations that will have conversations with people saying, look, I think you're overworking a bit, but then give the same pressures, or maybe even maybe even create more intense pressure, which just tells you that I care at some level about your well being, but we're not really going to do anything about it.
Paul Barnett 26:48
And Jim, do we hear anything from the great coaches when it comes to the transfer of energy to the group?
Jim Woolfrey 26:56
Yeah, one of the themes that comes up is that the energy the team feel or perhaps able to generate comes from the vision the leader outlines. And the good example comes from Hynek Amaya, the South African rugby coach. So let's have a listen to what he had to say.
Heyneke Meyer 27:12
I think the most important thing is to have a vision for the team. And the bigger the vision, the bigger the energy. You have to have a vision that inspires people. And I always say to young coach, I like working with young coaches. It's like a magnifying glass. If I take a magnifying glass, and I don't have exact exact same vision, there is no energy now we play this style. We do this style, we want that we stand for this. This is our culture and you change every second day. You're going to say set set vision written in stone so everybody knows exactly what you have. But I want to achieve and everybody's focused in the same same direction. You focus with a magnifying glass, you put it on one spot, everybody's focused. You have enough energy to start a fire that can destroy everything.
Paul Barnett 27:56
Dr. Gavin Jim, thank you both for your time today. I think Hynek Amaya and his idea of the bigger the vision, the bigger the energy is a great place to finish. Gavin, it's been terrific talking with you again, I think your ideas around generating energy and using it. Gavin has been terrific to get you back on again, I think your ideas around creating the time and space needed to generate the type of energy that leads to high performing teams was fantastic. And I look forward to getting you back on again perhaps in the next month or so to talk about another issue or another area where psychology and science come together with high performance from the sporting world.
Gavin Weeks 28:41
Look forward to it, Paul, thanks so much.
Paul Barnett 28:44
And Jim, thank you for being the voice of the great coaches today.
Jim Woolfrey 28:48
Great, thanks, Paul.