The Energy Drainers on Your Nonprofit Team
The Energy Drainers on Your Nonprofit Team, and What To Do About It
You can feel someone’s energy when they walk into a room. Hopefully it’s some positive vibes like lighting up the room the second they walk in. These kinds of people leave the rest of the people in the meeting feeling energized and motivated. Unfortunately, it’s often the opposite that we find in our stretched, underfunded and overwhelmed nonprofit teams. Someone comes to the meeting dragging their butt, heavy vibe and all. It doesn’t take long for their icky feeling to infiltrate the room, leaving everyone a little quieter, burnt out and discouraged. Like Kool-Aid crystals, energy moves through a room, and as the leader, yours moves the fastest.
This matters for your own energy and its impact on your organization, and for the collective energy of your leadership team. The vibe you’re giving off, whether that’s engaged and positive or heavy and overwhelmed, spreads to everyone around you. The more intentional you are about it, the better chance you have of being the leadership team that lifts others up instead of dragging them down.
Your own energy
Think about how you’d describe yourself lately. Are you the person who brings the juice and the passion, the one people describe as infectious? Are you the calm one, the anchor, the person whose presence makes everyone else feel a bit better? Sometimes I was. I’d show up at the office in the morning singing the latest song I’d heard on the radio on my drive to work. I’d have a bit of pep in my step and a cheery voice. My energy created a ripple across the team.
Sadly, there were times I was not like that. I’d arrive grumpy, head down, ready to tackle whatever challenge I was facing with determined persistence, but little “joy” for those around me. And that “stay out of my way” energy rippled a different feeling through those around me.
Maybe you’re checked out, drained, negative or frustrated. Perhaps you’re the one who’s antsy, a bit frantic, and reacting a little too strongly to everything. As such, the people are quietly watching to see what mood you walked in with today. Or maybe there is a heaviness to you. Glum, depressed, down and low energy.
I have a slide in my training with a picture of someone sick and coughing, and it says, “Your vibe infects your tribe.” And so whether your vibe is lifting up or dragging down, it’s doing that to everyone around you. But it’s not just you. The rest of your leadership is having a similar effect.
Your team’s collective energy
A leadership team has its own energy too, and it isn’t just an average of everyone’s individual mood. Your collective energy creates the culture of your organization. Every workplace has a specific culture. It has a feel to it, an impression that it leaves. Your workplace has a certain intangible quality that makes something about it distinct and decidedly different but difficult to define or describe. You know whether you like it or not, and whether you want to be there or run away quickly. A big portion of this comes from the team’s energy.
Some teams walk into a room together, and there’s a buzz, people building on each other’s ideas, everyone leaving a little more charged than they came in. Other teams are steady, nobody rattled, calm even when something goes wrong. And some teams have gone the other way, meetings that feel like walking on eggshells, nobody sure what will set someone off, or the opposite, a flatness where people are in the room but nobody’s really there. Those are the energy drainers on a leadership team.
I’ve had Executive Directors describe their own team in almost this exact same way. One told me she could feel herself suck the air out of the room when she addressed a problem. She didn’t want it to come across that way, but she didn’t know how else to do it. Another said her team seemed oblivious to their own negativity. They were so caught up in the dark humour, heavy sighs, and “moaning and bitching,” they didn’t even seem to notice the problem.
Why it actually matters
When this happens, morale slips, meetings get tense because everyone wants out of the room, and good people start looking around for another job. A leadership team running on empty sets that tone for everyone underneath them, whether they mean to or not. Gallup’s research backs this up directly, finding that managers account for 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement. Your energy isn’t a side issue for your team; it’s most of the equation.
As I talk about often, zest, or energy and enthusiasm for life, is definitely needed in leadership. But you can’t bring it if you don’t have it. Energy isn’t a fixed trait, though. You can build, bring and create energy, even when you are short-staffed, underfunded and stretched way too thin.
So what actually shifts it
You are probably skeptical about how to build energy when it feels like there is so little. It’s not impossible; it just takes a bit of sleuthing to figure out where to start, and it depends on what’s really going on for you and your team.
The Infinite Leadership Loop
PAUSE. Stop and turn inward. Most of us never do this. We just keep whacking moles, going from meeting to meeting, fire to fire, and crisis to crisis. The energy problem just keeps riding along underneath everything else. The more frequently you pause and take a look at what’s really going on, the sooner you can create the experience you desire for you, your leadership team and your organization.
PONDER. Tune in to what’s actually happening: your thoughts, your feelings, what’s driving your team’s behaviour. You might ask yourself some questions like:
- What’s actually going on here, not the excuse you’d give in a meeting, but what you really think is happening underneath?
- Is this a “me” problem, a “them” problem, or some tangle of both?
- When did this start feeling different than it used to, and what changed around that time?
- If you had to guess right now, would you call this exhaustion, disorganization, or people working against their own wiring?
- What are you telling yourself about why this is happening, and is that actually true, or just the story that’s easiest to believe?
PIVOT. At some point, as you slow down and ponder, you’ll start to see things more clearly and maybe from a different perspective. Shift your thinking to see the situation differently, and choose a new direction.
PROCEED. When you’ve had an aha or two, it’s time to move forward with intention instead of reaction. Moving with intention may mean trying something different, or reaching out for someone who can help you do it. Perhaps you’ll ask a mentor or your boss, or realize it’s time to talk to a consultant or trainer who can help you build it. This part will take some courage, often because it’s going against the path of least resistance, which, if we are honest, hasn’t been working, but has been easiest.
PEOPLE. This shift in thinking, coming up with a new plan and maybe asking for help, will mean you first interact with your leadership team differently, addressing the energy problem head-on.
Three common directions
Wellness: Sometimes the real work for a team is supporting your leaders and team in finding a pace people can sustain. If you see burnout is the real issue, you may pause and strategize how to bring more wellness to the day-to-day structure of your organization. It might mean having a facilitated conversation about whether the exhaustion you’re seeing is really about the size of the workload or about how that workload is being carried and how to carry it better.
Time management: When everyone is overwhelmed with their to-do lists and can’t figure out how to prioritize, set boundaries and say no, it might be time for some time management 101 training. We often think this should be common sense, but it’s not something that’s actually been taught, including how the basic tenets of time management apply to a group home setting, to the cultural styles of people on your team or to the reality of the clients you serve. Each nonprofit has a unique challenge, and having some honest conversation about how to manage projects, priorities, and pace might be worth it.
Strength-based leadership: Sometimes the issue is that your team doesn’t fully understand their own strengths, so people are working against their natural wiring instead of with it, which is exhausting in a way that’s hard to put a finger on. Not everyone is a morning person. Some people are great at working in a team, others not so much. You’ve got people who need time to think before they make decisions and others who want to work collaboratively rather than in isolation. If you’ve got people firmly trapped in their job description rather than what they excel at, it might be time to talk about how to use your strengths more effectively across the whole leadership team.
The work I do with leaders before we ever set up a training together is walking through this loop with them until we find what’s actually underneath it, and then building something that fits that specific team at that specific moment.
Here’s what that actually looked like for one Executive Director who worked through this loop with me last month. She realized she is the visionary and ideas person, great at starting things and kicking off new programs. But it’s her team who gets left implementing without sufficient resources. That awareness helped her think differently about the conversation she needed to have at her next leadership team meeting, and about bringing me in to review their collective Gallup Strengths again, to look at how to approach the workload in a more sustainable way.
If any of this sounded like something you’d like help sorting out, I’d love to talk it through with you. Email me, and we’ll find a time to figure out what would actually help your team.
