While leaders want to optimize their performance, they often miss what actually enables it. Aligning their workflow with their energy is one of the most powerful, yet neglected, tools leaders have.
I’ve found most leaders lack awareness about their unique energy and replenishment cycles. Most of us don’t create workflows that acknowledge our energy patterns or communicate them with our team.
Our energy patterns are our individual natural rhythms of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy throughout the day and week.
One way this shows up is leaders with overbooked calendars and constant output, with no time for movement, good food or replenishment. In addition, there are many subtle ways leaders work against their natural energy cycles that are just as detrimental.
Examples:
- The executive who schedules their most challenging weekly meeting at 5pm, when their energy is the lowest.
- The executive who blocks off time for strategy work but fills it with the wrong work that doesn’t advance the business.
- The leader who starts each day tackling low-value tasks, though they have the clearest thinking in the morning for complex, high-value work.
- The leader who responds to emails when they receive them outside of business hours, even though they weren’t otherwise working.
- The team who communicates urgencies through different avenues each time: sometimes by text, other times by email, phone calls, or Slack. No one knows what to expect.
These examples demonstrate we are often dealing with many small drains to our energy in a workday that accumulate. If leaders keep pushing through, they can end up exhausted at the end of each day, without knowing why. They are also at increased risk for burnout.
To lead at your best, you must first understand your own energy patterns: when you’re most focused, when you are most depleted, and what actually restores you. Then, leaders can create personal workflows and team norms to respect those rhythms.
This is important because nonstop effort doesn’t create our highest capacity and productivity. We maximize our performance when we align with our energy patterns. Our brains need time to recharge. If we aren’t building in replenishment throughout the week, month and year, we aren’t optimized. Vacations should not be the only time we replenish.
My research shows replenishing our energy is key to thriving and operating at our full potential. Additional research highlights when leaders create a culture of replenishment on evenings and weekends, it significantly improves employee well-being and recovery, reducing emotional exhaustion.
How to create workflows that respect energy patterns:
1.Build self-awareness about energy patterns
Many leaders, including senior leaders, tend to become victims of their calendars, not creators.
To shift to becoming a creator of your calendar, bring awareness and recognize your own energy cycles. Throughout the workday, notice and take inventory of your daily patterns: your energy level, productivity and clarity of mind. Pay attention to it and tap into it from a daily perspective.
For instance, some people have the most energy and productivity in the mornings. For others, it’s later in the day or evening. Broadly, we can optimize our individual workflows by including periods of sprinting and recovery.
Notice how you show up to work each morning:
- I’m already drained. I don’t know how I am going to get through another day at work. If so, then what needs to change?
- I feel neutral. I’m not resisting work but am not excited either. If so, then what aspects are working and what aspects need to change?
- I feel energized. I’m ready and excited, let’s go! If so, then what’s working? What happened in the evening or that morning before work starts to create that?
Consider your typical replenishment needs as well as anomalies where you need extra recovery, including: bad nights of sleep, travel delays, late business dinners etc. How do you recover from those?
Reflection:
- When do I feel most energized at work? Most productive? Most clear headed?
- When do I feel optimized to start my workday and week? What happened to create that?
2. Optimize your workflow and replenish
First, look at your calendar to determine how you can optimize your workflow for your energy patterns. We often have more control of our calendars than we realize. Meetings tend to be scheduled based on convenience, not optimization. We can be more intentional about the meetings on our calendars and blocking our schedules.
Next, focus on how to build in replenishment. As a result of your increased awareness, you can determine what you need to replenish during the workday as well as on evenings and weekends. One size does not fit all. The point is to be intentional about replenishing.
For example, some executives have shared weekend work helps them feel like they can step into doing their best work during the week. Others recharge best on the weekends when they don’t focus on work.
During the workday, pay attention to:
- When are your regularly scheduled meetings? Are they optimized to when you are energized and productive?
- When can you block time for thinking and productivity? Block it based on times you feel most clear headed.
During evenings and weekends, pay attention to:
- How to create cut off moments to intentionally transition from work to home. This is especially important for hybrid and remote work when you aren’t driving home to decompress.
- What you need to replenish to show up energized the next workday and on Mondays.
Reflection:
- What’s one change I could make to my work calendar to optimize my workflows?
- How can I build in replenishment?
3. Create team norms about communication preferences
Teams tend to communicate with each other based on assumptions. So often, even with the best of intentions, leaders often fail to create team norms about communication preferences. What happens then is the team operates on unspoken norms, which can lead to resentment.
There are often not agreed upon team norms about:
- What meetings times are optimal for everyone’s energy
- Evening and weekend communication preferences, both for the whole team and individuals
- How to communicate about urgent issues during business hours vs. non-business hours
Leaders can create team norms about communication preferences by:
- Asking each person on the team to share their workflow both during workdays, evenings and weekends. Be open and honest about your normal replenishment cycles and what you need
- Create agreements about how to handle team communications during business hours and for evening and weekends
- Make adjustments for individual preferences as needed
Recovery should not be considered a reward. It is foundational for high performance and optimizing your workflows. By aligning our calendars with our energy and building in replenishment, we unlock our full capacity to lead.
Start small: proactively build in what fuels you during the week and create clear norms so your team can do the same.
