Tag: Chief Executive Officer

High Performance CEO Energy

High Performance CEO Energy

Posted on by nrg2perform in Article
High Performance CEO Energy

High Performance CEO Energy

By Craig Johns

Is it a badge of honour in your workplace to work non-stop, be the first one in the office, the last to leave and be answering emails while on holiday?

In your industry is it cool to be pumped up on caffeine, get an average of 4-5 hours’ sleep a night, have the most billable hours, and be out socialising with clients and colleagues most nights of the week?

For most, you will know that if you keep up this frenetic pace you will at some point burnout, get sick, hate what you do and maybe even lose something as precious as your marriage. However, you keep repeating that ‘next week or ‘next month’ you will take better care of yourself, but we all know that someday is unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever, and is more likely to happen when you reach a point that is too late to recover from losing things that are most important to you.

One day you will wake up and feel utterly miserable, exhausted and hating your life. You are highly likely do something spontaneous that is out of character and possibly you will regret. When you get to this point, it is not your mind and body that has let you down, it is the CHOICES you have made. Choices that you have had total control over.

EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER

If you are caught in this downward spiral, hopefully you get to the point where you say ‘I don’t want this anymore’, ‘I don’t want to be stuck on this emotional roller-coaster’, or ‘when my ENERGY is dipping, I can’t control it’. So, how do you expect to be taking everyone to a higher level when you are feeling at such a low point?

Companies and their staff set KPI’s around sales, profit, growth and in some cases, industry rankings. They want to achieve new standards, reach new heights, produce something that no one else has before and become successful. They desire high PERFORMANCE, but most act like complete beginners and are in fact are delivering an amateur environment every day that is destined for personal failure’s and in some cases company catastrophes, that are totally preventable.

PLAN YOUR ENERGY

World class Performers, musicians, artists, speakers and especially athletes do not get to be at the top of the world by living in a life of constant stress, exhausted ENERGY stores, lack of sleep, ENERGY-sapping hours and pointless activities that have a negative effect. They establish goals, set out a plan to achieve them, and develop strategies that deliver high productivity, enhanced ENERGY reserves, adequate recovery and rejuvenation, vibrant relationships, and PERFORM with positive mental, emotional and physical vibrancy.

You need high levels of ENERGY every single day if you want to deliver high levels of PERFORMANCE. It doesn’t matter what you have achieved by natural talent, pure luck or just doing more hours than anyone else, if you are constantly withdrawing from your ENERGY reserves, the quality you produce will begin to diminish overtime and you will not reach your optimum potential.

CEO ENERGY

As a CEO, business owner or an important leader, you require as much ENERGY as a high performing athlete. So why do so many neglect vital aspects such as fitness, nutrition and recovery as part of their daily HABITs as they desire to be successful? Is it because it is a challenge to directly measure physical, emotional and mental PERFORMANCE in the workplace compared to say an athlete, musician, artist where PERFORMANCE is out there in a vulnerable environment for everyone to see both the delivery of and the final result?

High ENERGY levels positively correlate with assertiveness, speaking up for yourself and taking actions toward reaching their dreams. It produces higher levels of creativity, people are more likely to deliver innovation, and come up with new ideas. Educational attainment and the pursuit of higher levels of understanding also positively correlate with high ENERGY levels.

If you have more ENERGY you have greater levels of confidence, self-esteem, happiness and are more likely to tackle bigger challenges. Mental alertness and positive emotions are enhanced, and you are more inclined to eat healthier and lose weight easier. A person with higher ENERGY levels exudes confidence, positive demeanour and a positiveness that enhances the likelihood of people believing in you, buy from you, following you and supporting you.

LOW ENERGY

Low ENERGY levels affect your ability to deliver high PERFORMANCEs and filters through all aspects of your life. People with low ENERGY levels tend to experience their mind feeling slow and foggy, they often feel physically exhausted, and they feel a lot of negative ENERGY and emotions. Low ENERGY correlates with low PERFORMANCE, unhappiness, lack of enthusiasm to take on challenges, lower perception of success versus their peers, lower confidence when facing adversity, less likely to eat well or exercise and have less influence over others.

Disaster strikes when people neglect their ENERGY while building their career. Focusing on developing positive ENERGY needs to be a HABIT developed at the beginning or at least the early part of your career. The last thing we need is a CEO, business owner or leader to turn into a stress monster, destroying their beautiful marriage, and causing significant financial losses because of constant low ENERGY levels.

HIGH PERFORMANCE

CEO’s, business owners and leaders tend to have higher levels of ENERGY that are significantly higher than managers, entry level workers or interns. This is probably due to the stakes and challenges being much higher and every decision has a major effect on how your PERFORMANCEs are perceived. It takes about the same level of ENERGY as a professional athlete, so you must care about your ENERGY as much as one. The more ENERGY you have the more likely you are to be happy and be determined to climb to the top of your primary field of interest.

To improve your ENERGY levels, you need to develop effective daily HABITs that include exercise, healthy balanced nutrition, recovery periods during the day as well as adequate sleep at night, the ability to switch off work, and spend quality ‘on’ time with your family and friends.

READ MORE ARTICLES

It’s All About Trust Link
Have We Got The Hiring Process Totally Wrong? Link
Are You Leading A High Performing Culture? Link
Are Leaders Born? Link
It’s Your Story Link
Be A Rookie Link

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Rip the band aid off

Rip The Band Aid Off

Posted on by nrg2perform in Article

By Craig Johns

It’s time that you rip the band aid off. When dealing with an issue or a crisis, we see so many people trying to fix the obvious on the surface, rather than digging deeper to see what is the actual root cause.

Symptoms stand out like a sore thumb, like a runny nose when we have the flu. But the real questions, that are hardly ever asked, should be what were the underlying factors that led our immune system to be susceptible to the flu and why weren’t we more proactive in preventing these factors?

NRG Band-aid 13072018

This is no different to the workplace, where issues and crisis’s are all preventable with effective strategies, planning and systems to monitor our projects, people, competitors and performance.

In saying that, it is impossible to prevent every issue and crisis, therefore we need to have really good systems to ensure that we fix the problem right the first time.

When dealing with an issue, people find it much easier to apply a band-aid and give a little bit of tender loving care, rather than spending some extra time to understand why it actually happened, ask the tough questions and identify whether it can be prevented in the future.

Why are humans prone to the ‘path of least resistance’?

Why are we so susceptible to the easy way out or way of doing things?

I find it really frustrated when I hear ‘let’s put that decision or project on hold until we have more time, more money, the perfect design or most frustratingly, a new hire arrives’.

Hesitation is the difference between winning and losing in most sports, and it is exactly the same in business. If you wait, someone else will get to the market first and therefore be in the prime position to control the market, or more importantly you risk becoming irrelevant.

Solutions can sometimes be the most simple and obvious that are right there in front of us, whereas other times there is no clarity or even a potential path to get us started.

As leaders we need to be able to step back and take a birds eye perspective, then firstly, allow our teams the space to see the obvious (if the root cause and solution are right there in front of us) and secondly, dig deeper until they can get to the bottom of their nagging pain in the butt.

People have a habit of dancing around the tough questions, as though they are afraid to offend someone or unravel a large mistake they or the team may have caused.

How can you create an environment where your team is encouraged to ask the right questions?

It is commonplace for issues to be lingering in the workplace, partnership and with our products or services.

Why is it so hard to put your pride, integrity, record and relationships on the line and front the big elephant in the room?

Nine times out of ten it comes down to ‘trust’. One hundred present of time, the level of trust is a direct result of the environment established by the leader.

Trust, that our team feel they are allowed to make mistakes and learn from them, and that people can ask the right questions when they don’t understand, believe there might be a better way or there are some barriers preventing a greater performance.

Let’s ‘rip the band-aid off’ and create an environment of learning, growth and most importantly trust in our teams

READ MORE ARTICLES

It’s All About Trust Link
Have We Got The Hiring Process Totally Wrong? Link
Are You Leading A High Performing Culture? Link
Are Leaders Born? Link
It’s Your Story Link
Be A Rookie Link

LEARN MORE

active CEO COACHING
active CEO CORPORATE
active CEO PODCAST
Craig Johns SPEAKER
Craig Johns BLOG
Contact CRAIG JOHNS
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Trust Craig Johns It Is All About Trust

It Is All About Trust

Posted on by nrg2perform in Article

An article in the New Zealand Herald (Donaldson, 2018) brought up a great discussion between ‘Command and Control’ versus ‘Self-Determination Theory’ in sport. It raised some great questions that relate to both the business world as well as the coach-athlete relationship. Has the traditional ‘hierarchical’ systems, which lead to command and control, become outdated or is there still a place for this type of leadership behaviour?

Let’s take a look at what the central currency to any community or relationship is. Trust is essential to any relationship and is, according to Mayer et al., made up of three key elements: ability; benevolence; integrity.

Ability is built on the skills, competencies and characteristics that enable a person to perform tasks in a specific domain. As a relationship is building those involved will be ascertaining whether the other party can do what they say, have a track record of performance in that particular area and is their any evidence supporting their claim to competency. It is usually situation specific as we cannot be highly skilled in everything we do.

Benevolence is based on the foundation of how much do they actually care about the relationship versus aspects such as money, power or self-fulfilment. Early in the relationship you are trying to understand each others situation, how much do you want to help each other and are the actions being taken beneficial for each other.

Integrity refers to our acceptance of a set of principles and whether they are being adhered to. Are the actions taken from and adhered to against a set of principles? We want to know whether they will guide or motivate our performance, are we accepting of each others performance principles, and do both sets of principles align or can they coexist.

I would also add a fourth dimension to trust, and that is enjoyment. Enjoyment is the number one retention factor for any type of community or relationship. It helps to love what you are doing and have fun why you are doing it. If the environment is enjoyable, then you are more likely to stay connected.

Command and control is based on an aggressive, micro-managing and dictatorial approach, which sometimes maybe referred to as ‘it is my way or the highway’ approach. It is a common approach that leaders fall into when the pressure for success in business or sport is enormous and a win-at-all-costs mentality is allowed to fester. In certain circumstances this mentality may result in bullying behaviours and a ‘culture of fear’, which are not appropriate our society.

We are seeing the command and control hierarchial approach being replaced in the work place and on the sports fields over time, but there are still many instances of this type of behaviour occurring in society. As people’s awareness, rights, confidence in ability to speak up and community acceptance that you should bring issues to the forefront, acts of bullying are being raised and stamped out. However it is still prevalent in politics, sport and the workplace.

Over the past two decades or so, we have started to see leaders evolve their approach as they understand that their are more effective ways to reach higher levels of performance and productivity. The Self-Determination Theory provides a great platform to understand how we can perform at our best and bring out the best in the people we work with.

Self-Determination Theory is built on 3 core elements; autonomy; relatedness; and competence.

“Autonomy is feeling you have a choice, that what you’re doing is of your own volition. Relatedness is to care for and be cared about by others, to feel you are contributing to something greater than yourself, to have your values align with the goals of the team or programme. Competence is about skill levels but athletes also need to feel they are learning and growing, not just reaching a set level.” (Donaldson, 2018)

If we are building a high performance environment, we need to allow our people to feel valued, be able to speak, have a sense of purpose and be true to themselves. We need to provide an environment where people feel highly motivated, feel like they belong and are happy, which the components of the Self-Determination Theory provides.

To build a feeling of autonomy in our people and ensure they are highly motivated and engaged, it is important that we reduce and refrain from approaches that involve dictating, incentivizing and applying heigh levels of pressure. We need to trust the abilities of our people and work on alleviating the fear inside our heads that we won’t achieve the desired results.

One of the most powerful skills a leader can possess is listening. To bring out the best in people, they need to have a voice and be involved in a collaborative way. That doesn’t mean as leaders that we can’t make the tough decisions, it eludes to ensuring that the feelings, values and thoughts of our people are taken into consideration to ensure they are closely aligned to the goals.

HOW MUCH TRUST DO YOU HAVE WITH YOUR PEOPLE?

RESOURCES

Donaldson. M. (2018). New Zealand Sport Model ‘Outdated’. New Zealand Herald, 24 June 2018. link

Roger C. Mayer, James H Davis, and F. David Schoorman (1995). An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. The Academy of Management Review, 20 (3), July 1995, 709-734.