Most organisations talk about wellbeing. Or host ‘Supporting Mental Health’ workshops. But its not mental and its not health and it often has little lasting impact on how people actually perform at work. The intention is correct but they’ve misdiagnosed the problem.
What they’re often really trying to address is something else entirely:
Emotional maturity, resilience under pressure, better communication, and fewer flare-ups when things get hard.
In other words, energy.
Not energy as enthusiasm or motivation, but energy as the capacity to stay regulated, present, and effective in the middle of real work. For People leaders, this shows up every day.
- In meetings that escalate unnecessarily.
- In teams that struggle to recover after pressure.
- In leaders who know what to do, but can’t quite access their best thinking when it matters most.
Teams follow the leader’s state
One of the most overlooked dynamics in organisational performance is this:
Teams don’t just follow direction from leaders, they follow their state.
- A leader who is rushed creates urgency.
- A leader who is tense creates caution.
- A leader who is depleted creates fragility, even if everything sounds fine on paper.
This is why focusing on energy management is not a personal issue or a “nice to have”. It’s a leadership capability skill. And like any capability, it can be developed.
Energy skills are not wellbeing initiatives
Working on your energy often gets bundled under “wellbeing”. That framing usually does it a disservice. Really impactful energy skills aren’t about self-care or switching off. They’re about improving how people operate when the pressure is on.
When leaders develop simple, repeatable energy skills, a few things start to change:
- Conversations become cleaner
- Emotional spikes reduce
- Decisions are made with less reactivity
- Teams recover faster after stress
Not because people are trying harder, but because the system is more regulated.
Energy Skills 101
In our work, we use many practices to support energy and performance. We want to share three skills with you that in particular consistently make a visible difference when leaders practise and embed them.
They’re not exhaustive, and they’re not complicated and their power comes from precision, repeatability, and cumulative impact.
E-Bank: managing energy, not time
The E-Bank skill helps leaders and teams start to see energy as a resource that can be managed, rather than something that just “runs out”.
The reason it is powerful is because the skill focuses on noticing what reliably boosts energy and what consistently drains it. This allows leaders and their teams begin to make better choices about how they spend their attention, effort, and time. The shift is subtle but important because energy stops being guesswork and becomes discussable.
For People leaders, this often opens up more honest conversations about workload, priorities, and sustainability, without framing it as burnout or under performance.
Many People leaders start simply by changing one question in their next performance conversation: asking where energy is being pulled from, and where it’s being boosted. You will see a visible shift in their prescience as they describe both. Noticing where the challenges are coming from is often half the battle.
BREATHE: regulating state under pressure
One of the fastest ways to change how a system performs is to change its physiological state. BREATHE is a simple practice that helps leaders regulate themselves before, during, and after moments of pressure, meetings, decisions, difficult conversations. The other brilliant thing is you can do it without others noticing it. When leaders practise this themselves and model it visibly, the leader and team will begin to:
- React less impulsively
- Think more clearly under stress
- Communicate with less friction
It looks simple, but that’s exactly why it works. Try it for yourself a few rhythmic breaths, taken deliberately, have a very different effect from a single deep breath.
MAP: listening that reduces friction
As People leaders, you’ll have seen this pattern many times. Many performance issues are actually listening issues. There is a communication breakdown between two leaders and chaos ensues.
The MAP skill retrains how leaders listen, shifting attention away from internal noise and towards the deeper meaning behind what’s being said. The effect is often immediate, when mastered you see that:
- Speakers feel less judged and more understood
- Conversations get to the point faster
- Tension drops, and truth surfaces more easily
Over time, this changes the quality of relationships across leaders and teams and with it, the quality of decisions.
Why these skills work
These practices aren’t powerful because they’re complex, they’re powerful because they are:
- Easy to repeat
- Able to be practised in real scenarios, not just in the workshops
- Can be easily modelled by leaders rather than just delegated
When energy skills are embedded this way, they don’t sit alongside performance they support it. And when leaders master them, they often find their own development accelerates with surprisingly little additional effort.
A different way to think about performance
The organisations that sustain performance over time aren’t the ones pushing harder. They’re the ones that have learned how to regulate energy across the system and manage pressure deliberately. Allowing people to think, relate, and decide well even when conditions are demanding.
For People leaders, this is an opportunity, not to add another programme. But to encourage and embed a small number of precise practices that quietly lift how the organisation operates day to day.
A final thought
If your teams are capable but reactive, committed but exhausted, or talented but fragile under pressure, the issue may not be motivation or engagement. It may be their energy. And energy, when approached properly, is something leaders can develop.
👉 If you’d like to explore how these kinds of energy skills can be embedded with leaders and teams in practice, get in touch: https://complete-coherence.com/en/contact-us