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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Creating Energy

Creating energy within a group is a responsibility of each member of the group. The leader of the group is in the best position to facilitate the proper environment and group dynamics for the team members to bring energy. "Am I an energizer or a demotivator?" is a question each one of us should be asking each day.

Team members who walk away on the group, disappear, set the wrong priorities, can not keep up promises are big energy drains. They demotivate their entire team bringing performance and capabilities down to the bottom. Moreover, demotivators are contagious. I have witnessed entire organizations brought down to their knees because of a first demotivator, he starts to whine and complain rather than propose and solve, or she misses a deadline followed by another and another and eventually those dependent on her miss their deadlines. De-energizers are easy to spot and they suck the energy out of the whole team.

This morning a colleague sent me an email asking for advice regarding a board meeting she chairs that gradually its members started dropping off like birds on a utility pole being shot one after the other. In her latest meeting no one showed up at all.

In my next post I will share seven ways that one can bring energy into their circle. Until then enjoy the TED presentation below on first followers and the energy they bring into their domain, a demonstration that energy is created and the responsibility of the whole team and not just the leader. Just like first followers play a role in energizing a group, they also play a role in draining a group and leaving it as a dead corpse.


8 comments:

Ibn Siddique said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ibn Siddique said...

Imam Safi once told us, "A positive person can affect one other person, while a negative person can affect four other people" - I believe this was off of some research that he was citing.

Looking forward to your seven solutions!

Ayman Nassar said...

Thanks for sharing Arif, yes negative reactions always have larger impacts than positive ones. This rule applies to losing customers, inducing negative experiences, negative perceptions, negative followers and the list goes on. I am sure others will find Imam Safi's statement insightful.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, that was extremely valuable and interesting...I will be back again to read more on this topic.

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Hello there,

This is a inquiry for the webmaster/admin here at sys-eng.blogspot.com.

Can I use part of the information from your post right above if I provide a backlink back to this website?

Thanks,
Peter

Ayman Nassar said...

Hello Peter. Thanks for the note and your interest. Feel free to reference whatever you find useful to your purposes.

Regards

Anonymous said...

Have you considered the fact that this might work another way? I am wondering if anyone else has come across something
like this in the past? Let me know your thoughts...