The Hagakure #81: Finding Stuck Energy

I often wonder: what is really the job of leadership in a company? I find it helpful to use different lenses to try and answer that question.

To borrow from physics, potential energy is the stored energy in an object due to its position, properties, and forces acting on it. Meaning, potential to be converted into kinetic energy.

Which got me thinking that, as a leader, your job is to keep looking for where energy is stuck (potential), and find ways to get it moving (kinetic) again.

Some examples:

That person with whom you feel stuck in 1:1s that go nowhere other than uncomfortably shooting the shit. “Yeah, everything’s fine.”

Everyone has a switch. Your job is to find it. If you don’t, all the latent energy this person has (even if it appears like they don’t) will remain untapped. To find that switch, you have to temporarily forget the work and focus on the human. Build a relationship. It’s never wasted time.

“What is something you found really interesting recently? Teach me all about it.” is a good question to see what lights them up—and, if you pay attention, you’ll likely hear in the answer important clues that might help you change something at work.

That person stuck with too much on their plate who believes more work equals higher performance.

Giving up responsibilities can feel like a failure. Yet, it is often not giving something up that is making them actually fail—and not the good type of failure.

A good leader/coach helps the person reframe a situation like this by first (kindly) exposing the limiting belief (“if I do less, I’ll be seen as a failure”), identifying the want or need that appears to go unmet (“being seen as successful”, “getting a promotion”) and finding a better way to achieve it (what success in the org, for that role, actually looks like.)

That team stuck with dull standups, bland post-it pushing, dot-voting retrospectives, everyone “working on tickets.”

What’s keeping them in this morass? Do the team members know what a high-performing team looks and feels like? What does success even mean to them?

A team stuck like this is often a multi-layered challenge, but it’s the leader’s job to dive deep, show the team what good looks like, and then engage them in finding and addressing the real issues lie. What’s at the boundaries of the team? What’s the bottleneck in the flow of work?

One analogy I like to use is “versioning” the team. Make the next retrospective about finding what the never “minor version” of this team could be. What’s one small upgrade you can make as a team in how you run—and then reassess in the next retro after that?

That company stuck with red tape, heavy processes, and soul-crushing bureaucracy.

It’s a nightmare to get anything done. People are stuck doing “work about work” with little actual impact. This is a tough one because it tends to be very intrinsic to the company’s culture. I once worked for a small startup that had an ex-consultant leading HR who implemented an extremely onerous company-wide feedback process. It consumed so much time and energy for an outcome that could be attained in much lighter ways—especially given the small size of the company.

It is senior leadership’s job to find ways to gauge the “cognitive load” and amount of “work about work” going on in the company. If you ask people, they’ll tell you. It’s just that usually nobody even thinks to ask those questions.

That company stuck in the “hyperactive hive mind.”

Cal Newport’s book A World Without Email describes the term “hyperactive hive mind” where all members of an organization are in constant, frantic, and often unnecessary communication.

Interestingly, more than stuck energy, this is a case of too much unfocused energy—too much activity, too little progress—that needs to be harnessed. While hard to measure, and similarly to the previous example, this is where senior leadership must be curious, observant and vigilant. Asking many people a question like “What’s typically the longest you can do focused work for without being interrupted?” is a good start.

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Most companies are full of creative, smart, well-intentioned people who will do good, impactful work given the right conditions. To borrow from physics, potential energy is the stored energy in an object due to its position, properties, and forces acting on it. Meaning, potential to be converted into kinetic energy.

As a leader, your job is to constantly look for where energy is stuck (potential), and find ways to get it moving (kinetic) again.

Because whenever energy is stuck, that’s your team or organization not living up to its full potential.