Vitality is Key to Leadership Performance
Leaders face incessant demands every day including: increasing the bottom line, building culture, cultivating teams, and much more. This is on top of being asked to see that employees thrive, as Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 and other industry leaders recommend.
So, how are leaders doing meeting all these demands? Sadly, the answer is not great.
Corporate America is facing a crisis in leadership. 72% of leaders are reporting burnout. Leaders are leaving large organizations in droves, and CEO departures have been increasing since 2004.
Asking leaders to perform at this level when every day leadership is draining isn’t working. Behaviors that leaders routinely exhibit—repressing or deferring their own needs, acting in ways that do not necessarily reflect how they feel, and using their own energy to boost others—are depleting.
It’s time we start focusing on how to support leaders differently. We expect leaders to serve at their full capacity but rarely give attention to how they could do so.
Through my research and experience, I have uncovered that the key to maximizing leader performance is “vitality.” Vitality is defined as positive aliveness; it is the inner resource that includes physical, psychological and emotional energy. It is on the opposite end of the spectrum of burnout.
Overview of Research findings
In my third and most recent vitality study, I conducted interviews with two dozen Fortune 1000 CEOs to understand their perceptions of vitality within their day and life. The aim was to learn more about two opposing ends of the spectrum of vitality vs. burnout: 1) what does leadership performance look like when we are highly vital? 2) And what does it look like when we are drained?
Eight opposing themes of leadership behaviors emerged that occur when leaders lead from being highly vital versus drained.
Leadership Behaviors when Highly Vital versus Drained:
1) Positive Relational Energy versus Negative Relational Energy
2) Curious versus Closed
3) Positive Environment versus Negative Environment
4) Encouraging versus Discouraging
5) Engaged versus Disengaged
6) High Capacity versus Low Capacity
7) Visionary versus Myopic
8) Inclusive versus Exclusive
The results uncover that leaders who possess vitality are able to transfer their energy to their teams, create positive and inclusive environments, engage with others, encourage people around them, and retain the enthusiasm and mental agility to excel in their roles.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, when leaders are drained, they create negative environments for those around them by being closed, acting more irritated, less grateful, discouraging, and disengaged.
My research highlights vitality is key to how we show up every day. Having a foundation of vitality gives leaders the abundance of energy needed for ourselves, to share with others and to meet the demands of their worlds.
And yet, it’s an under focused piece of the puzzle of leadership. The good news is leaders can take action and be supported in cultivating their own vitality to strengthen and maintain their energy so they can perform at their peak.
How leaders can cultivate vitality:
1. Maximize your wellbeing
The results of this research reiterate what my second study shows: increasing your vitality starts with caring for your wellbeing.
The nine pathways of wellbeing, from the PERMA+4 model, provide a roadmap. By maximizing your own wellbeing, you will have the energy to serve others from a place of abundance.
The pathways are: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment, physical health, mindset, environment and economic security.
It’s essential that organizations and leaders reframe how we think about leaders and leadership using these pathways as a foundation. Leadership is a full-body experience; wellbeing and leadership capacity cannot be separated.
The CEOs I interviewed highlighted several of these pathways as critical to fostering vitality, mentioning relationships most often, followed by physical health. Multiple quantitative studies also validate the elements of wellbeing as a key to fostering vitality.
Reflection questions: When you look at the list, what gets your attention? What’s one wellbeing pathway you want to focus on more?
Try taking one small step towards supporting your wellbeing. And then, take the next step. For examples, check out my past blog on the Nine Pathways of Wellbeing.
2. Create Space in Your Day
There is a perception that CEOs have more control over their time than the rest of us, but my research suggests that one of the biggest issues for this population is out-of-control calendars. This lack of space reduces effectiveness.
Three-quarters of the CEOs I spoke with discussed the importance of making space in their day to think, plan, and get work done as an essential part of their vitality. Unfortunately, the back-to-back meeting culture makes it incredibly challenging to actually execute. This issue has only become worse as virtual work has increased. As one CEO said, “When I’m working from home, I’m giving, giving, giving, giving. By the end of the day, I’m just dead.”
Instead, leaders can begin intentionally operating differently, both individually and systematically within their organization. Start by creating blocks of time on your calendar throughout the day to think, reflect, or simply relax, every day. Consider changing meeting durations from 30 minutes to 20 minutes or from an hour to 45 minutes. Make the commitment to yourself, your team, and your family that this time for space is essential and may not be infringed upon.
Ultimately, transition time gives you and others in the organization space to recover and be creative.
Reflection questions: Assess the current time you allot for space in your day: what’s working and what’s not? What one change would help you create more space in your day?
What’s possible when leaders operate from a place of full vitality?
The CEOs I interviewed shared what it’s like when they feel highly vital and its impact on others. Here is how two of them described it:
“I feel it's my time when I am at my best. There's energy flowing out of me into vessels of people around me.”
“Being able to bring that energy, to be a spark, to be a source of strength and confidence and influence, it's rewarding for me, and I think it creates a great environment within which people like to work.”
What’s possible is that leaders thrive. They show up and lead as their best selves, positively impacting others and creating extraordinary results. And when leaders thrive, it creates an environment where employees can thrive too.
If we want leaders to go the distance, to perform at their best, then we must start including vitality in how we approach leadership.