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Are you Carrying Positive or Negative Energy?
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How is the energy level at your company? Would you characterize the situation as positive or negative? Is there room for improvement? Are you a manager or leader looking for the key to hitting your goals this year?
As a manager or leader, your greatest charge in 2010 is to turn sales reps and others into a team focused on team goals as well as individual goals.
Another big goal is to keep up the energy and motivation. To create an environment of action and vitality.
First, let’s define what organizational energy is not. Organizational energy is not short-term enthusiasm, although that’s important.
Rather, organizational energy is grounded in something much deeper. It’s grounded in a solid commitment to an organization’s mission and values.
All individuals have energy. We wake up, go to work and move our bodies in an orderly fashion. What’s most important, though, is the emotional desire we have to achieve bigger and better results. That’s where managers and leaders must concentrate their efforts. On building this desire within their people.
As the team’s leader or manager, you own the power supply. It’s either a positive charge or a negative charge. A positive charge is possible when everyone is asking what they can do to make customers want to do business with your company? When everybody is working together to create an atmosphere where your customers do business with you, not because they have to but because they want to. That’s powerful.
Positive energy leads to great service, problem solving and achieved goals.
Conversely, negative energy divides team members and creates job dissatisfaction. Bad service, complaining, nitpicking and mediocrity are the norm.
Here’s an example of negative energy. Many years ago, I remember my dad pushing a hand truck piled high with cases towards one of the delivery vans. He needed a hand and asked for help from one of the guys that was arriving for work. Without missing a beat, the young man replied, “Hold on, I have to go punch in!”
Dad didn’t appreciate that reply (to say the least) but he had no choice but to wait for him to return.
That’s negative energy. I’d like to think that our company was 100% committed to getting wine, beer and spirits into the hands of our customers as quickly as possible; but that simply wasn’t the case.
Did a few minutes really matter? Probably not - but I think if time-clock Joe felt the passion, as my dad did, he may have reacted differently.
To him, it was just a job.
So what do you do if you feel that you or your company is mired in this type of environment? For one, you can go back to the drawing board. Concentrate on the basics. Share the vision again and again. Whatever your company stands for – keep repeating it. Consistently ask – what are we trying to accomplish here? What type of environment do we want? How should we be treating each other to achieve a positive situation?
The other strategy is to share some of your enthusiasm.
But wait, “I’m not enthusiastic!” Managers, leaders and salespeople tell me all the time. Sure, you may not be born brimming with enthusiasm, but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop an enthusiastic attitude.
Let me frame it a different way?
Do you have children?
How did you react when little Johnnie took his first steps? Were you hooping and hollering? Even the deadest doornail on the planet can act enthusiastic if he or she wants to. And when you do, your personal energy, and in-turn, your team’s energy will increase because, as you know, energy is contagious.
Make sure to monitor energy leaks. If your team constantly operates in a state of panic and upheaval and everyone is stressed to the max, the inevitable will soon occur. A drop-off in energy. No one can operate with guns a firing all the time.
Alternatively, if status quo is the behavior of the day, that’s not such a good situation either.
Whatever the case, spend some time working on your energy level this week. You’ll be happy you did and so will your teammates and customers.
That’s just the way it works.
