8 Energize Around a Shared Reality
Oh, I know what heaven is,” the four-year-old girl explained matter-offactly to the doctor. Then with a broad smile, she said, “I’ve seen heaven.”
The doctor grinned at the young girl, then at her parents. Before the appointment, the adults in the room had made a decision: The little girl’s life-threatening illness had worsened. There wasn’t much time left. With hearts that only those who’ve endured such a situation can ever know, they decided to try to talk with the child about what was going to happen. With good intentions, they had asked the girl, “Do you know what heaven is?”
Sometimes, though, even the brightest doctors aren’t as smart as children. After being told that she had seen heaven, the doctor said, “Oh you have, have you? What did heaven look like?”
Without fear or doubt, the girl confidently answered, “It’s a magical place where they serve ice cream in the morning!” Her smile was so broad and big that it now lives beyond her life—and in the hearts of those who made sure she knew a heaven on earth.
“The child wasn’t afraid of dying,” said Pam Landwirth, CEO of Give Kids The World. The phone line was quiet for a moment as we all lived in the space of a miracle for a moment. Then Pam added, “That’s why we do what we do.”
No one takes their business imperative more seriously than the team at Give Kids The World (GKTW). Founded by Henri Landwirth in 1986, the nonprofit resort located in Central Florida provides weeklong, cost-free vacations to children with life-threatening illnesses and their families.
Of the 27,000 children in the United States who are annually diagnosed with a life-threatening illness (and far more around the world), half of them want to visit the collection of theme parks and other attractions of the warm-weather state. The team at GKTW will serve over 8,000 of those families, and they do everything within their power to make sure every single one of them has the trip of a lifetime. They even serve ice cream for breakfast.
“Our guests only get one experience,” Pam told us passionately. “So it has to be perfect. And with more families coming every year, that’s not easy.” The size of their operations is mind-blowing. Nearly 200 full- or part-time team members coordinate the efforts of over 18,000 volunteers. With 1,600 shifts each week, GKTW may be the largest single-source volunteer organization of the nearly 1.5 million charities that exist in the United States.
The team at GKTW is doing huge things. For the rest of us who have ever attempted (and likely struggled) to lead four or five volunteers in our communities, comprehending the effort and excellence needed to lead 18,000 is nearly impossible. How do they do it?
“Everything is about yes,” answered Pam. “Every wish a child has, every challenge we face as an organization, our entire focus as a team is on how to make it happen.”
This type of empowerment requires that every person on the team at GKTW be equipped to make the 3 Do Big Things Decisions. “Our team members all believe that ‘once upon a time’ begins for our guests with me. That means that everyone on the team, whether you’re a cook or a housekeeper or whoever, you are empowered to make things happen,” Pam said.
When something doesn’t go as planned or a problem surfaces, there isn’t time for focusing on who’s to blame, the myriad of other problems they have, what they don’t like or respect about one another as teammates, or all the reasons they can’t do something. In every interaction there’s a predominant focus on how to deliver with excellence. This concentration creates a stunning energy that elevates the organization to solutions.
“Ninety-seven percent of our guests rate their experience with us as one of highest satisfaction,” Pam said. “We’re determined to move that up. There’s so much at stake. Excellence for everyone is what we’re about.”
Some may think it would be easy to energize teams who are tasked with fulfilling a child’s dream. Such an opinion, however, is a misguided insult to nearly all those who operate in the nonprofit world. The energy of purpose and passion are powerless without focus, structure, and process.
Among the teams we’ve studied—no matter whether for profit or not, education or government—those that consistently do big things have an undeniable ability to frame a shared reality, and then approach events, issues, or problems in a common and energizing way. In other words, it’s less about what these teams do. It’s how they do it that makes the difference.
How to Energize the Team Around a Shared Reality: The Energy Map
You know that drive you make to work each morning? Or to the grocery store? You’ve made the trip so many times you could make it in your sleep, as they say. Your brain has established neural pathways, mechanisms by which information travels, that with repetition become deep grooves of thinking. The result is an autopilot effect: You don’t have to think much about what you’re doing.
Now imagine you’re observing a team through a one-way mirror. Let’s say there are 10 people participating in a meeting, six seated at the table and another four via video on the large screen. Each person is operating with their own established neural pathways, and every repeated or similar experience the team has deepens the grooves of how everyone thinks about events, the business—and each other.
As a result, the behaviors of team members become predictable due to the formation and reinforcement of neural pathways in the brain; repeated focus results in replicated thinking, that drives the same behaviors. Just like that drive you take frequently to the grocery store, it may look something like this: One person rolls his eyes every time a certain other teammate says something. When the customer is mentioned two team members sigh, because they think they know more than everyone else about the customer. Every problem the team faces sends certain others into a finger-pointing exercise or a hands-up posture of apathy.
Regardless of how much talent is on a team like this, how clear the business objectives or plans are, these teams will always struggle to achieve much at all. Such teams lack the collective intelligence levels and collaboration skills necessary to succeed. With members of the team defaulting to outdated or destructive neural pathways, the focus—and therefore thinking and actions—drives unhealthy conflict due to always following the same lines of concentration. And to be certain: A team that can’t process and exchange information together can’t work together.
Unequivocally, what separates the teams that accomplish big things from those that achieve little is this: collectively, team members orient their focus and energy more consistently forward. Indeed, your team’s human forward focused energy is the imperative resource to accomplishing any objective of significance.
Figure 8.1 The Energy Map
Teams like those at Give Kids The World and others that are high achieving have constructed distinct and powerful norms when it comes to how they process information together. Specifically, they establish similar neural pathways together that are productive and effective at navigating and aligning the team forward far more collaboratively. Collectively, the intelligence of the team, along with its ability to work together, measurably increases.
This is when a phenomenon occurs. As team members focus forward together it translates into the experience of expanding and bigger energy. As a result, rather than developing a narrative or way of thinking that diminishes the team’s effectiveness, a team can purposefully stimulate and energize itself in seconds. Now, individually and collectively, people are elevating the best of who they are in a new, shared reality.
The Energy Map (Figure 8.1) captures and makes tangible how a team can effectively align and focus their energy. It is a mental model (a frame everyone can see with their mind’s eye) that enables a team to quickly—within seconds—construct an effective way to share how they relate to the world they’re all operating in. This is accomplished because the Energy Map provides your team with a common language, a method to communicate two things: (1) This is where my or our focus is on the Energy Map, and (2) This is the space on the Energy Map that I or we need to have our focus right now to be productive.
From your experience, how often do you see a team come together and agree on how the members of that team will see, experience, and respond to the thousands of events or issues they will encounter in their work together? It’s rare. This is precisely why teams that do big things are rare. This doesn’t need to be so, as the teams at Give Kids The World prove. They adapt far more quickly and effectively than average teams do because they function with an orientation toward yes.1
Figure 8.2 Back Side of the Energy Map
The Energy Map represents 100 percent of a person’s or team’s focus, energy, and time.2,3 Because your brain can only focus on one thought at a time (Mind Factor #1), in any given moment, you can only be in one of three locations on the map: the back side, the middle portion, or the front side. Equally significant: Energy is never static. Because your brain goes toward its focus (Mind Factor #3), you automatically go deeper into that portion of the Energy Map where you’ve chosen to bring your focus.
For example, as you can see on the Energy Map, if a team is focused on problems (Figure 8.2), it’s literally impossible for them to see a solution. As clarified by the brain research presented in Chapter 7, they can only find more problems and increase the chances that they’ll experience more of the stress and fatigue associated with doing so. This explains why teams report high incidences of wasted time in meetings; too often, one person starts by stating the problem and—instantly—because people go toward their focus, entire meetings are spent discussing problems. Teammates then hang up the phone or close their computers thinking, “We never get anything done.” Or worse: “This team will never do big things.”
As we’ve supported scientists, engineers, and others in the technical community, we’ve learned of their unique fondness for the Energy Map, too. Often they tell us one of two things occurs for them in meetings: (1) They work with team members who want to rush to identify solutions before the facts of the event or issue are fully understood, or (2) The team gets stuck in neutral, the middle portion of the Energy Map, endlessly analyzing data. No one seems to have the courage to say, “We know enough to make a decision. What’s the best solution moving forward?”
With the Energy Map, team members now have a common language because everyone can see where their focus is and then collectively decide where it needs to be for the team to be most productive. Teams that aren’t ready to move forward, like those in the technical community we identified as an example, can now say, “Wait! Let’s spend more time in the middle part of the Energy Map before moving forward.” Or, “We’ve spent enough time collecting and analyzing data. Let’s move to the front side of the Energy Map.”
When the team does shift their focus forward on the Energy Map, given the research we cited in Chapter 7, their concentration enables them to see more possibilities. At this point, even the bodies of team members get rewarded: A dopamine rush occurs. The chemical, in this case released deep in the middle of the brain in the mesolimbic pathway, tells the other parts of the brain, “Hey, something good—maybe even awesome—is about to occur. You’d better pay attention!” And, of course, the body of every teammate responds with an energy most teams are dying for. The whole heart is now in it.4
In your meetings, is your team fatigued and sneaking peaks at the clock or are team members bringing their best selves, with an energy that drives improved outcomes? Your answer provides a clue as to where your team likely is spending much of its time on the Energy Map (see Figure 8.3).
No surprise, the teams at GKTW likely experience a dopamine rush more often than teams that do small things. They are deliberate with their focus so they can be of greater service to their team’s business imperative. They spend less time focusing on the back side—trying to determine who or what is to blame, what they don’t like or respect about one another, why things can’t be done, and so on—and more time in the middle and on the focus points on the front side of the Energy Map.
Figure 8.3 The Energy Map with Choices for the Back Side, Middle, and Front Side
There are endless choices for your focus within the three portions of the Energy Map. Those identified in the diagram are merely a sampling; they represent the most significant choices in focus teams must be aligned on to do big things.
Noteworthy is the fact that a lightbulb turns on in the brain only after a lightbulb turns on in the heart. Conversely, sitting too long on the back side of the Energy Map creates a dark experience. We don’t recommend you try the experiment, because others have: They maintained a focus on all the reasons why their team can’t succeed (or other back side focus points). As a result, doubt quickly gave way to pessimism, and ultimately, cynicism.
This sort of thinking and actions are predictable, because focus and emotions are hardwired together. The type of focus you have predicts the type of emotions you experience. What’s more (and this is key), it also works in reverse. Left to its own choosing, your brain will select a point of focus based upon what you are most emotional about. In other words, the focus that evokes the strongest emotion often gets the most attention. (Your teammates who incessantly talk about the same things over and over again, and show little ability to move on, provide the perfect example.)
The Energy Map provides you with a mechanism to be purposeful about the focus, energy, and emotions you want your team to experience. And there are certain situations that require a team to go to the back side of the Energy Map before they can effectively focus forward. (We’ll be exploring those situations later in this chapter.)
How much time does your team spend focusing on the three parts of the Energy Map? And what sorts of results is the team capable of delivering as that focus is shifted strategically? As we take you through the examples of how teams have leveraged the three parts of the Energy Map, this wisdom is important: Your team can strategically begin its discussion anywhere on the map it chooses. In other words, in the example that follows, the team chose to start on the back side for good reason; you may choose differently. Your choice is determined by the needs of the team and business. Either way, get ready for the type of energy you need to do big things.
Stop Trying to Be So Positive
You could hear the desperation in Carl’s voice. Everyone in both companies that formed the partnership effort had their eyes on the project Carl was responsible for leading (a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign featuring your project will cause that to happen).
Halfway through the teleconference, the truth came out: “Listen everyone,” Carl said. “This thing is a house of cards right now. If anything unexpected happens, then this whole thing comes tumbling down.” Then he cleared his throat, giving everyone the cue that he was raising his hands and asking for help. “I’m doing everything I can to keep people on the team positive. But we’re losing it. The stress is unbelievable.”
No one said a word; the phone was silent.
Just be positive. That’s the solution, right? The positive psychology movement has and continues to take humanity to important places in thinking and actions. Most of us now know that positive thinking is life’s magic elixir: We live longer, healthier lives. We have better relationships. We’re more productive, and the list goes on.
Yet, in this moment, none of those aspects are on Carl’s priority list. He’s got one thing on his mind (and we don’t blame him). Make bloody sure the project succeeds.
Have you ever tried this experiment? The next time your team is feeling hopelessly stressed and is leaning toward an angry meltdown, smile and say, “Hey! Let’s be positive about this!” If you’ve ever done that, you’ve likely noticed two things: (1) The rest of the team seems to get angrier, and (2) In the weeks that follow, you discover that you’re no longer getting invited to key decision-making meetings.
In our work with teams, we’ve found an undeniable dynamic: There’s a severe gap between what experts in positive psychology are saying is necessary to accomplish a positive mindset and a team’s ability to get there. Equally important, it’s not because people don’t want to be positive. Instead, they’re simply not equipped to better facilitate a shift in focus.
This is one simple and profound way the Energy Map has supported thousands of teams. It equips them with a practical and easy way to facilitate a necessary focus that creates more positive outcomes—without having to tell people to be positive. Here’s what that looked like as we supported Carl and his team’s ability to deliver their big project.
Leveraging the Back Side of the Energy Map to Develop the Team’s Ability to Move Forward
Fact: A team can only do big things when the members of that team have an open mind that is receptive to bigger and enhanced thinking. No matter how insanely common the practice is in companies, minds don’t open by putting money in someone’s wallet. Nor do the number of windows in a person’s office correlate to an open mind. There’s only one way.
The Dalai Lama XIV said, “An open heart is an open mind.”5 As has been established, emotions rule our day. When we control the focus that determines our emotions, we become greater masters of our mind.
It’s virtually impossible for any of us to have an open heart—and therefore an open mind—when we’re upset (angry, insecure, jealous, frustrated, and other emotions often labeled as negative). Carl’s team was becoming distracted, hopelessly stressed, and disconnected. And they had a right to feel that way (see Figure 8.4). The relentless feedback they were receiving from others on where they were failing, what they were doing wrong, and all the problems they had (all focus points on the back side of the Energy Map) was de-energizing them. Plus, their self-chatter about what they disliked about some of their own team members and why the plan they had wouldn’t work, had added a dizzying amount of confusion and insecurity.
Worse, some team members were turning everyday debates (the healthy conflict the team needed to find the best way forward) into moments of relationship conflict. Ideas weren’t being deliberated; people were. Meetings became energy-sucking exercises, leaving the team with an inability to adapt in effective ways.
Figure 8.4 The Back Side of the Energy Map Includes Specific Points of Focus
Carl, and leaders like him, who take on the burden of trying to get their team to “just be positive” under such circumstances might as well try to get through the Grand Canyon by rowing a bathtub. It’s an impossible task. Instead, we coached Carl on taking these three steps so he could create more positive outcomes by effectively making the Activator Decision and bringing out the best in others:
1. Draw a picture of the Energy Map and give a three-minute overview of how everyone’s brain works: the 3 Mind Factors.
2. Instead of ignoring pain, we coached Carl to meet the team where they were in their focus (and thus their emotions). Carl’s ability to acknowledge the team’s stress, anxiety, or frustrations would have a significant effect. We told Carl to leverage his emotional courage by sharing a story of how he, too, was frustrated at times.
3. Next, we coached Carl to bring out even more of the back side energy the team was experiencing. After all, if they didn’t do it now, they’d carry that dysfunctional focus into future discussions, or into the hallway, cafeteria, parking lot—or worse—home. Instructions had to be given to the team that no one could defend or reply to how team members answered these and similar back side of the Energy Map questions:
• What are you frustrated with at this point in our project?
• What circumstances or dynamics anger you about our current situation?
• How might you be disappointed in the team as a whole at this point?
Freeze! Our experience tells us that some people will say, “No way! We can’t discuss these questions as a team. That’s too scary.” Yet, remarkably, these same people will confess that they devote endless hours to such scary discussions in informal side discussions. These conversations have a high probability of pitting members of the team against each other by driving separate realities. The Energy Map enables the team to bring the veiled barriers they must break through into the meeting in a safe manner. By doing so, everyone on the team can now be real, tell their truth at the same time, and talk about what most people are already aware of, anyway. Now, everyone can process and move forward together.
Here’s what the back side of the Energy Map discussion may sound like for Carl’s team. Notice that the words center on the team, rather than on individuals.
• “I’m tired of not finding out that we’re not on target until people blow up with anger.”
• “My perspective is that we have too many side discussions occurring that make our decision-making process irrelevant.”
• “It’s frustrating doing everything you can to succeed only to have people who are supposed to have your back sabotage your efforts.”
No one is suggesting that a team regularly initiates discussions on the back side of the Energy Map. Far from it. Remember Mike the astronaut? We couldn’t identify one moment when his space shuttle crews had to spend time on the back side of the Energy Map; experience tells us that most teams don’t have to start or go there often. But, just like Mike the astronaut, now, if something goes wrong, you have a proven process for success and can take the team to the back side or middle part of the Energy Map as needed. This enables you to more effectively move forward.
Using the Middle of the Energy Map to Create an Emotionally Neutral Space
William Shakespeare was a big fan of the Energy Map (Figure 8.5). (No, we didn’t coach him. The great bard intuited this powerful way for seeing the world around him.) He once said, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”6 Were he alive today, Shakespeare would make a fine business consultant because he would immediately see what causes so many teams to underperform: peer judgment. In other words, on many teams, there’s a whole lot of “he/she’s good, bad, right, and wrong” occurring.
Business requires that each team member’s performance be assessed by how much value they bring to the team. This, however, has unintended consequences. It’s no mystery why so many people on average teams shut up and never speak up. To offer thoughts and ideas freely is to subject oneself to the judgment of, and possible rejection from, others. On too many teams, being vulnerable is far too risky. It’s better to be quiet than to be perceived as wrong and risk being Doofused (the act of someone holding a destructive belief about others) by teammates.
Figure 8.5 The Middle of the Energy Map Includes Specific Points of Focus that Relate to Data, Facts, and Information
This is how the middle of the Energy Map rescues teams from debilitating judgment and unnecessary conflict. Carl’s team, for example, had encountered big problems and was desperate for a method to analyze those problems without triggering defensiveness and blame and casting dark clouds over the heads of teammates.
The middle of the Energy Map is emotionally agnostic; it’s fact-data-information centric and nothing more. Therefore, its energy is neutralized. It’s a space that enables each team member to speak up and state, “This is my understanding of what is.” There is no persuasion, no energy of attacking others or defending self. The middle of the Energy Map is where the team gains a full view of their reality. It is how a team forms a truth together.
For a team like Carl’s, this process sounds something like this: “Here’s what we know: We are twelve days from our next milestone, and our supplier can’t get us the material we need for seven more days. That gives us a five-day window to do the job.” Or, “We’ve discovered, from our perspective, that if we are to do this job, it will require greater technical skill than we currently possess on the team.” Or, “The customer continues to provide us with clear instructions on what they need done.”
Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s that I stay with problems longer.”7 We presume that the late, great management guru Peter Drucker was a fan of Einstein’s, because he added, “The right solution to the wrong problem is more dangerous than . . . the wrong solution to the right problem.”8
Doing big things as a team requires the patience to invest essential time and truly understand the problem your team is facing. Some teams can’t do this, however. Focusing on and discussing problems about the work generates defensiveness among some team members, shuts down others, and builds walls where transparency is needed. It presents team members with three perceived and nasty options: (1) Keep your mouth shut and let someone else speak up; (2) Speak up and risk being wrong, viewed as “negative,” and therefore, Doofused; or (3) Speak up, offend someone, and provoke defensiveness and conflict with other teammates.
If these appear to be the only options, a lot of people choose to play it safe. They sit back, hope the customer will understand why the real problem wasn’t addressed, and wait for the meeting after the meeting when they can have honest discussions with one or two colleagues who are sympathetic to their perspective. This approach, of course, means that it is far less likely the real problem or issue will be accurately understood by the entire team. Spending more time on issues means people on the team may be exposed; the real truth about what happened or what’s necessary to improve is going to come out. And it must if a team is to truly do big things.
No amount of preaching about trust will enable the team now. What’s necessary is a mechanism to see the same reality and tell the truth faster. The Energy Map is the tool to do that.
Thousands of teams, like Carl’s, love the middle of the Energy Map because it immediately gives them a space to act on their emotional courage and deliver the transparency the team needs to transcend the issues they face. This skill creates these and other important outcomes:
• A focus on problems no longer creates problems with people.
• The removal of emotions from events, issues, facts, and data creates safety for everyone to speak and be their authentic selves.
• Any team member can now apply their preferred process for determining the cause of problems and strengthen connections among team members as they do so.
We equipped Carl to ask questions oriented toward the middle of the Energy Map that enabled the team to reference this same point in reality. Here are some samples:
• What do we know for certain about this most recent event?
• How do we define the issue we’re facing?
• What do we believe is the truth about this situation?
• What information do we need to consider before we move this forward?
Because Carl’s team knows the Energy Map and understands that it’s okay to respond to the neutral questions, it creates psychological safety. Such a dynamic is a requirement for effectively addressing problems, because it creates the conditions for everyone to freely share diverse and different ideas before the team starts to explore solutions.
Every team that does this becomes more effective, because the people on the team are able to operate within their integrity more consistently. Their whole heart is in it.
Using the Front Side of the Energy Map to Put Values into Action
We’ll return to Carl’s team in a moment. First, though, let’s explore the brain trust, a team at Pixar, that harnesses their focus to make sure their film studio consistently delivers top films to the market. As directors and producers, the job of the brain trust is to provide feedback on films that are being developed by other people and teams in the organization.
We’ve observed teams in some companies where giving feedback can be a career-threatening exercise for people (and, ultimately, life-threatening for the organization). Only a certain type of feedback fans the flames of creativity, greater innovation, and the creation of a future people can’t yet conceptualize. Sadly, despite good intentions, some teams kill ideas before they’re ever given an opportunity to develop.
Members of these teams dump feedback from the back side of the Energy Map. They utter phrases such as “what I don’t like about the idea,” “why it won’t work,” “the problem that wasn’t considered,” and other nonstarters. These backward focus comments sap the very energy from team members they need to bring new ideas to realization. Energy that is being used to protect oneself can’t simultaneously be used to expand and build the connections necessary for the team to succeed.
That’s why the Pixar brain trust, led by CEO Ed Catmull, uses a front side of the Energy Map approach. Disciplining their focus to concentrate on that which is constructive to the team’s purpose enables them to make an epic impact in their industry. According to author Greg Satell, in his Forbes article, “The Little Known Secret to Pixar’s Creative Success,” members of the brain trust at Pixar give creative feedback for one purpose, and that’s “to move the project forward. Anything that does not fulfill that purpose—no matter who it comes from—has no place in a feedback session.”9
The Energy Map enables teams like Carl’s to replicate the discipline and practice modeled by Pixar. Here are the steps we equipped Carl to take with his team as they built on the momentum they created in the back and middle portions of the Energy Map:
• Make it clear that “this rocket is about to take off.” In other words, we’re ready to move forward. Ask: What else does the team need to discuss on the back or middle parts of the Energy Map before we move to solutions?
• Ensure the team has the same reference for reality by sharing what’s important regarding the event or issue, and why that’s important. For example, Carl could say, “It’s critical that we adapt immediately given the feedback we just received, so that we can stay on schedule and on budget.”
• Ask these and similar front side of the Energy Map (see Figure 8.6) questions to move forward and improve outcomes:
• What does it look like for us to succeed in integrating this new data into our work plan? (What the team sees is all there is!)
• Why else is it important to us that we adapt quickly? (Intrinsic motivations are the fuel to our inspiration.)
Figure 8.6 The Front Side of the Energy Map Includes Specific Points of Focus for Solutions, Lessons Learned, What’s Working, What You Like, and Objectives and Execution Plans
• What do we need to prioritize to execute effectively? (Identifying what we can control is empowering.)
• How will we know we’re succeeding with our new plan? (Accountability is a human choice; this question leverages that wisdom.)
No longer does Carl need to tell his project team, “C’mon guys, let’s be positive.” Instead, because he’s strategically using the back and middle parts of the Energy Map, the conditions have been set for his team to focus forward. The positive energy that follows powers the team to do big things.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson and other experts who study positivity report that when we shift our concentration to points outlined on the front side of the Energy Map, human perceptions are altered. Positive emotions flow. Seemingly without effort we begin feeling better (and emotions rule), our mindfulness expands, and we transmit a focus and energy that moves us from me to we.10,11
This is the same energy you experience during birthday celebrations, festive holidays, or when you leave a place of worship having spent an hour living in gratitude. In other words, it’s the state of mind our brains are in when we’re more likely to be modeling our values.
Now, however, Carl’s team doesn’t have to wait for the end of the project or a date on the calendar or feedback from the customer for his teammates to focus and feel this way. He equips his team with the Energy Map so they can replicate this focus and energy any time they choose. This is how they deliver on their human imperative and live the behaviors necessary to do big things.
It’s working. (The Energy Map can’t not work; it’s how everyone’s brain operates.) Carl’s team used the Energy Map to ensure each person was bringing their best (the Contributor Decision), bringing out the best in others (the Activator Decision), and partnering across the business to deliver the shared objective (the Connector Decision). By enlisting the focus and energy of those on and beyond the team to a greater forward focus, Carl’s house of cards project has stabilized and delivered on target and on budget.
“I’ve been very impressed in terms of how everyone has been engaged,” said a senior VP in Carl’s organization as he spoke about the team. “We’ve put aside our old thinking of what company we come from or the function we’re responsible to, and have approached this as a true team effort. I think we’ve done more joint collaboration between the two companies than I ever expected in such a short time.”
The Energy Map: The Direction Needed to Successfully Innovate
How fatigued is your team? Do you possess the energy needed to do what you must?
A leadership team, within a global company that relishes making sure you have nutritious food to feed your family, was losing power. Their business imperative was beginning to look unachievable: They needed to successfully adapt and innovate internal operating processes to meet changing consumer needs. When we first met the team, they were adrift and making only painful and slow progress against their goals. Despite the innovation centers and think tanks they had established, they had little to show for their efforts, except evidence that they were thoroughly exhausted. It didn’t take long to figure out why.
Focusing on problems wears people out. Nicole Torres, in her Harvard Business Review article, “Looking for Problems Makes Us Tired,” revealed that researchers have proven that we all feel twice as much mental fatigue when our brains are focused on avoiding risk (what we don’t want to have happen, a focus on the back side of the Energy Map).18
Because the Mind Factor #3 is always turned on (the mind goes toward its focus), one observation of the leadership team would give anyone the impression the team was on a treadmill of rumination, repeating a cycle of back side of the Energy Map discussions. Not only does such repeated and reinforced thinking cause team members to disengage, researchers also show that, left unchecked, even depression can occur.19
Here’s the part of every story about a self-sabotaging team that breaks everyone’s hearts: The people on this team are really good human beings. You’d choose them for your neighbors; you’d trust them with your kids. And, like all good people, before they were even introduced to the Energy Map, they knew something was wrong—which, with sick irony, made things worse.
A focus of “why are we failing” only throws people further into despair. “Focusing on what’s wrong about what we do activates circuitry for distressing emotions,” according to Daniel Goleman.20 “Negative focus leads to discouragement and disengagement.” The result? Our brains “long to tune out.”
This leadership team was going backward—and picking up speed as they went.
Enter Mary. In our discovery work prior to engaging with the team, we found out that because of Mary’s role in operations, she touched nearly every part of the company’s internal processes. And when she inserted herself into idea-generating discussions, it had one effect: innovation stalled. That is, unless it was her idea.
Joe Brown, the brilliant portfolio director at IDEO, a famous global design company, makes it clear that Mary’s approach dooms organizations to the status quo. He told us, “One of the biggest things that gets in the way of creativity and the innovative process is when people think, ‘My idea is better than yours.’ To succeed, you must separate the idea generation process from the judging process.”21
The CEO at the food company could see Mary’s caustic effect on the team. “She has a way of de-energizing people,” the CEO told us. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s well respected, knows her job like nobody else, and is a huge technical asset to our organization. But she doesn’t bring the best out in others, that’s for sure.
“When people go to her, she intimidates them with her intellectual interrogation,” the CEO said. “When I told her that she was shutting people down, she replied, ‘We don’t have time to waste. I can’t stand it when others come to me with half-baked ideas that are not well formulated.’ That’s when I knew exactly why we weren’t innovating fast enough.”
Experts call the energy between two people relational energy, and it’s a big deal if a team wants to do big things. According to Wayne Baker and his fellow researchers at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, when teammates focus on a positive vision, contribute meaningfully to a conversation, are fully present and attentive, and when we give signals of progress—all things we associate with the front side of the Energy Map—relational energy goes up. No surprise—attention, motivation, absorption in work activities, and improved performance follow.22
In short, and likely no surprise to anyone reading this: Being on the front side of the Energy Map generates high-quality connections among team members.
Perhaps you’ve seen this dynamic before: A bright teammate (like Mary) started her career full of energy and the ability to relate to others. She climbed the ranks fast. She seemed destined to be a superstar. Then something happened. She stalled. Not because she’d suddenly lost her technical skills. Somehow, she began to lose the ability to connect with others and relate to their environment.
If any of us didn’t know about the 3 Mind Factors and the Energy Map, we could easily capitulate to Doofusing (subscribing to a harmful belief about someone) this once bright teammate (“What a loser! She used to be so cool—and now she’s a jerk.”). But brain researchers would caution us and encourage us to check our own focus. What happens to the rising stars, like Mary, can happen to any of us. Here’s how.
When a teammate increasingly focuses solely on metrics, numbers, and problems (which is what a lot of people in roles higher in the organization are required to do), their brain repeatedly stimulates a neural circuit called the task-positive network. This stimulation, in turn, overpowers the default mode network, which is critical to being receptive to new thoughts and concepts, people, and moral issues. This leads to trouble. Teammates with a curbed default mode network have difficulty seeing or having empathy for the people around them.23 In sum the more the brain focuses on hard numbers, the less the brain can engage at a more human level.
The CEO of the food company had invested a lot of money in assessing personality preferences and styles of team members. While the exercise helped build awareness and empathy, the information gleaned from the effort still didn’t predict a person’s ability to focus on the Energy Map. (Neither does a person’s IQ level.) Despite the fact that the team knew who they were as individuals, they still weren’t equipped to connect energetically and transfer knowledge among themselves effectively.
Often this is where teams fall apart, and good people suffer. The space between people where there are no connections are filled with wedges, and divisions become greater. Team members who had hearts filled with optimism begin to deliver a diminished effort. As the team flatlines, headhunters begin to circle like vultures, then drop in and poach talent.
Here’s a seven-step sample* of how we supported the CEO in equipping Mary with the Energy Map, so she could more effectively connect with others in a way that would fuel the energy needed to successfully innovate:
1. The first step was being grounded in the wisdom that nothing is wrong with Mary. She has everything she needs to be great, including a heart the size of the Pacific Ocean.
2. Ask Mary: What sort of focus and energy do you believe are necessary for a team to successfully innovate?
3. Then show Mary this book and equip her with the 3 Mind Factors and the Energy Map.
4. Share with Mary in your authentic way something like this: I have some middle of the Energy Map data for you, Mary. In the interest of sparking new thinking, some of your teammates come to you with ideas that are not fully baked. Their experience is that you respond on the back side of the Energy Map. Whether their experience is the reality or not, if it were, what would you want to do about it?
5. Listen carefully to Mary’s response.
6. State clearly to Mary what’s important to you—and why—as it relates to focusing more strategically on those parts of the Energy Map that will effectively foster the conditions for innovative thinking.
7. Ask Mary: Is it important to you that you better connect energetically with those around you? And if so, why?
After the CEO had this type of conversation with Mary, we debriefed with her. She informed us that, at first, Mary responded defensively, attempting to explain why she had to lead the way she was. She even folded in the common excuse of “We’re here to get results!” This rationalization once provided a free pass for command-and-control managers in many of yesterday’s organizations, but not here. The CEO listened and validated, then brought Mary back to the middle and front side of the Energy Map by asking, “What focus and energy is important for the rest of the team to have for us to deliver on our initiatives?”
It took several weeks, yet because the 3 Mind Factors are always turned on, Mary began to shift. Predictably, as Mary changed her focus from judging what her teammates’ ideas lacked, and instead concentrated on being curious and exploring, she soon began to respond like the star she is. Predictably, in time, people began bringing more ideas to Mary. And as they did so, breakthrough thinking and actions followed.
The team was saved. The talent on the team has stayed, and is attracting people with even greater skills. (An enjoyable moment included observing team members laughing together, something they rarely did before.) And, as this book went to press, the leadership team had sustained a shift in their focus that was driving a renewed vigor as they pursued their lofty innovation goals.
People want to be great. And being great requires a certain sort of focus and energy. Equipped with the Energy Map, people can prove they are who we believe they are.
The Power of a Shared Reality (Dude, What Planet Did You Come From?)
Try this exercise. When you read the test statement at the end of this paragraph, please determine how it makes you feel by choosing from one of three options: It makes you feel (1) good, (2) bad, or (3) neither (you simply don’t care). Ready? Here’s the statement: The U.S. women’s national soccer team is the most successful team in international women’s soccer.
Are you excited about this news? No? Indifferent? It’s safe to say that with a large enough sample size of readers, we’ll find ample people who respond each of the three ways to the statement about U.S. women’s soccer.24 And consequently, three diverging interpretations of reality will emerge. (We know this is true given our own tests with our friends from Germany, Brazil, and other futball-crazy countries.)
Our focus determines how we see our world. That focus, largely established by emotions, comes with personal biases and tendencies. It results in a frame of reality that locks in how we perceive and interpret events or issues around us. And as nearly every expert who’s studied human thinking has said: Our brains make their own reality.25
It’s one thing to be sitting in a sports bar with friends from other countries debating the realities of who has the best national soccer team. That’s a low-risk exercise; unless someone’s had too much to drink, everyone is usually friends when it ends. Of much greater risk is when you enter a meeting with peers representing other parts of the business, and everyone is framing the reality of your shared business imperative differently:
• Some people are seeing big opportunities to grow market share for the business.
• A couple of other teammates can only see what the initiative is going to cost them (their budgets are already shot and they’ve got no extra time to give).
• A few others can only see what success or failure will mean for their year-end bonuses.
• And still others are there to support any decision, though they passionately caution the impact of the decision on a team and organization that is already exceedingly stressed and short on resources.
What all too often ensues for teams is a display of human behaviors that is unbecoming of any of us, as people attempt to disguise their reality or convince others their reality is the true reality. It all leaves participants wondering what planet their peers came from.
Forcing others to see, let alone adopt, our reality or truths doesn’t work. As a civilization, we have a few thousand years of experience (and counting) to prove that persuading or demanding others to adopt our worldview is an exercise in futility.
Teams destined to do small things function from this harmful belief: If we pump enough data and information out to everyone, they’ll get it and understand why we have to do things our way. This tactic rarely works, however, because despite the fact that everyone is looking at the same data (and tons of it), they’re focusing on it in a manner that only reinforces their frame of reality. (What you see is all there is.)
If data were all anyone needed to get a team across the threshold of working together, the political parties of our nations would already be harmonizing our world (and that’s currently not happening).
“We need to reconceptualize what ‘team’ means. It’s far more a lateral exercise now,” leadership authority Jim Kouzes told us.
“And what’s necessary to succeed?” we asked.
“The skill of the twenty-first century is empathy. If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we’ll need to understand diverse points of view—and not just understand, but value those views.”26
What we’ve repeatedly observed in teams that do big things is that at some point in the team’s maturation, something clicks. They move from pitting realities against one another and leave behind old frames of the way things used to be. And they form, see, and function from a reality they create together. Most often this occurs when there’s a frequent focus on a shared objective or motive. This prompts hearts to open, which enables the eyes to see what they previously couldn’t. Here’s an example.
Mike Taigman is on a team doing big things. Their charter: Establish what the future of emergency medical services (EMS) looks like in the United States. It’s a joint and massive undertaking. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Homeland Security are all sponsors. What this team of the nation’s physicians, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and dozens of other professionals must accomplish isn’t easy.27
“We need to build a system that is patient-centered and community designed, where all the entities are truly integrated,” Taigman said. “The entities and people within health care are quite separated right now. Getting everyone to share an understanding and adapt to changes in the world that aren’t even conceived of yet requires remarkable teamwork.”
Here’s a prediction: Given what this team will accomplish, the odds are that, in the years to come, someone reading this book will know a person whose life was saved because of the success of this team. The stakes are high. Their ability to make an epic impact is directly correlated to their ability to construct a common way to see our world now and in the future.
Taigman is well aware that data will play a significant role in their success. From experience, however, he knows they must go further than just facts and figures if they are to achieve this big task in front of them. The data must evoke a shared meaning. To accomplish this, two questions, among others on the front side of the Energy Map, can transform a team: What is our ultimate purpose or objective as a team? And why is achieving that so important to us?
“These are essential steps,” he told us. “If you can’t get to a deep sense of shared purpose, your success is imperiled.” He told us what that looks like.
“We once facilitated this approach between the emergency medical services team [the people in the loud and fast ambulances] and the hospice care workers.”
Until Taigman accomplished a shared emotional connection for everyone involved, things were a mess. Debates raged over who was doing things wrong and why. “Paramedics typically totally disrupt the hospice world. It’s not pretty,” he said. Sirens and speeding ambulances don’t make peaceful moments. “But after we brought everyone together and got a deeper shared purpose running through our system, things changed quickly.
“Everyone involved wants those in hospice care to have their wishes honored and to die with dignity in a place of their choosing. Once we consistently made that our focus, the rest of our work—like budgets and the need for extra steps in the process—those things all took care of themselves,” he said.
This wisdom reinforces why teams that do big things can make an epic impact. They know that changing and elevating behaviors is not an intellectual exercise. It’s the business of the heart. Teams that bring only intellectual energy to their efforts will increasingly struggle in today’s data-rich world. It doesn’t matter so much what any of us see; it matters more how we experience what we see together. The more meaning we have in our work, the more energy we have for our work. The more meaning we have when we’re together, the more meaningful the impact we make together.
*Note: There are ample opportunities throughout these steps to incorporate value-add coaching points and questions. Trust your experience and instincts.