Written by: Trish Bishop, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If you're not familiar with the Top 10 Rock Star Skills and how they relate to High-Performance Leadership, you can check out this earlier Brainz article to learn more.
Creating a Baseline of Understanding Energy
The first step is to help you to understand that you do, in fact, sense and interpret energy – and that you're doing it all day every day. Think about the following questions:
Have you ever entered a room and felt distinctly uncomfortable and unwelcome, or felt very welcome, like you were completely and totally at home?
Have you ever had someone lie to you or cheat on you, you knew it, but ignored the knowing, only to find out later it was true?
Have you ever been to a sporting event and felt the momentum shift during the game?
What's happening in these situations is that you are reading and interpreting energetic information. We all have this capability, it's an innate skill we all have access to. The only challenges with our ability to leverage this capability are:
Whether trusting this sense was conditioned into, or out of, you as a child. For most people, it was conditioned out of us. Think of the times you may have told your parents, a teacher, or an older sibling that you felt uncomfortable in a situation or that you didn't like or trust someone, only for them to dismiss your feelings. This is how the conditioning begins. I do not believe this was done intentionally, however, that does not change the outcome for you.
Where we have past experiences or traumas that have led us to believe we shouldn't trust the information we are receiving. Often times when you look back on these situations, no matter how bad it seemed at the time it was happening, we can usually see how it triggered events and decisions that eventually moved you into a better situation.
OK, so how does this relate to the work environment?
If YOU can sense these energies, everyone else can too – as noted this capability is inherent for everyone. And I would submit there are at least a few people on your team who are very sensitive to the energy around them. If you want to shift to high performance leadership, you have to create trust.
This is fundamental for high-performance teams, you literally cannot get too high performance without it. Trust is multi-layered. There is the surface layer of trust – this is when you spend months or years building trust with others through your behavior.
The issue with this surface layer is that it only takes one mistake for that trust to start to crumble. Then there is foundational trust, this happens at the energetic level and cannot be manipulated or manufactured. You can even be a bit of a jerk and others will trust you if your energy is fully aligned with what you say, think and feel. It is when you are out of alignment that people will inherently not trust you, though they often won't know why. The ideal world is to have both foundational and the surface layer developed deeply with your team.
Rock Star Skill No.1 Respectful Communication
Too often leaders have learned how to use language as a tool to communicate respectfully with others. Think of a time that someone you reported to said something positive to you but the comment left you feeling flat or even deflated. This was you intuitively sensing that they were not genuine in what they said to you. You were literally sensing dishonesty. Were they lying? Possibly, however, it is more likely they were not aligned in what they were thinking, feeling, and saying and you were sensing the lack of alignment. When this happens, we inherently mistrust what we are told, and it plants seeds that the person themselves are not trustworthy.
Now flip that situation to where you are the leader. If you know you are thinking or feeling that someone let you down on a project and yet you compliment them on a great job, you are failing them on multiple levels. First, you are not aligned in what you are thinking, saying, and feeling what you're saying is not the same as what you think and feel. This will generate an energy of dishonesty and the person will mistrust what you say. Second, in order to create high-performance capability, you have to be able to have hard conversations with your team members.
If you are feeling and thinking there was something wrong with their performance, it is your role as a leader to bring that forward and address it. This hard conversation, when done in a way that you are fully aligned in what you think, say, and feel, as uncomfortable as it might be, builds trust. Not addressing the issue erodes it. The third, and one of the most devastating impacts, is if other team members see you complimenting what even they knew was not a good job. Why should they knock it out of the park if sub-par work is all that is required? These are pivotal moments where the loss of top talent begins.
How do I Become Aligned?
There are many aspects to this, most of which include you doing your own personal development work. However, a quick hack is to shift into a positive mindset and put your ego aside such that you can align how you feel with this re-framed thinking. Instead of thinking, "OMG, Susan is going to drive me insane with her incompetence", can you re-frame that too, "What can I do to support Susan's success?" I understand there are many difficult performance management issues that come up, and not all of them are easily solved. However, I can guarantee you that when you shift out of a sense of frustration with others and into a space of genuinely wanting their success more than your own, you will see the shifts happen right in front of your eyes.
For those team members who will simply never come along, this divide becomes even more evident and you will generally see this more clearly, allowing you the opportunity to have direct conversations with them about why they want to be there and what they're willing to do to realize their own success – fully putting the accountability on them for how they are choosing to show up. For those who just didn't feel supported or were not sure they could trust you or the team around them, you'll start to see them flourish with nothing more than a shift in your energy in how you think and feel about them.
Everything has energy, especially your thoughts and feelings. Take the time to become aware of what your thoughts and feelings are and, when they are not positive, take a moment to re-frame them. This will take time at first, however, before you know it, you'll realize that your first thought about everyone will be positive AND that your feelings will match your thoughts. An important final note – you cannot fake energy. So if you have a positive thought, "What can I do to support Susan's success?" but you feel frustrated by Susan, you are, again, out of alignment. It is imperative that your thoughts and feelings match. Do the inner work to shift to this. Once you do this, you will find that Respectful Communication will become as natural for you as breathing.
Trish Bishop, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
After launching, and taking public, one of the first Internet Service Providers in Canada, Trish quickly found her niche as a ‘translator’ with an exceptional ability to translate business needs into solutions. She also discovered early in her career that she is highly intuitive, and then honed that gift into her corporate superpower! She blatantly integrates both the corporate and woo-woo aspects of who she is and attributes this to the amazing success she has had in her career, including developing 6 high-performance teams.
As an Energy Integration Coach, Trish teaches leaders how to create massive transformation for themselves, their teams and their organizations by learning how to read and interpret energetic information (aka intuition!) In addition to being a highly successful IT Project Manager, Trish is also the author of 'The Question Journey', a Shaman, Empath and Certified Angel Guide. Her mission: to heal corporate workplaces one leader at a time.
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