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Work Should Generate Energy, Not Sap It

Forbes Human Resources Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Michael Gretczko

It’s 5:45 a.m. There is a candle flickering in the room. A bass booms. I pump my legs. Left, right, left, right. My heart starts pounding. I suck in air. Soon, I’m pouring sweat.

Does this sound like a nightmare? It’s just the opposite.

I start most of my days at SoulCycle, a 45-minute, high-intensity spin class. It’s my “secular sanctuary,” as one of their founders describes it. The class grounds and focuses my mind, resets and recharges my body with the energy I need for the day ahead. It enables me to bring my best self to my work. (I swear I haven't been paid for my comments — I’m just plain addicted.)

When I travel, I invite my colleagues to ride with me. We become a tribe at these classes. By the time we get to our post-workout coffees, we’re connected in a more intimate and intense way, high-fiving and sharing our sense of accomplishment.

As I reflect on what I love about cycling, I realize there are parallels between what it does and what great organizations strive to do. Both seek to maximize our human potential. Both are focused on enabling us to impact the world around us by unlocking our best capabilities and intentions.

There are three lessons from my spin class experience that align with how leaders of high-performing organizations unleash the energy of their workforces.

Common objectives provide direction.

It starts with the music. Every class pairs an instructor-curated playlist of music with the exercise program. It might be a fast, frenzied techno track for a sprint or a slow, steady rocker for a hill climb. It sets the direction and defines the rhythm of the class.

The music is akin to your organization’s goals and culture. The best organizations have clear goals and a culture that unify its people and establish the rhythm of work: a steady pull when it’s business as usual, a sprint when disruption looms. In today’s fast-paced markets, the goals are dynamic and responsive to the outside world. And leaders continuously curate the culture, tweaking it to inspire the workforce and to set the pace, and learning over time the combination of elements that provide people with a compelling, collective experience

The challenge that many leaders face today is composing music that is compelling to the workforce. People want meaningful goals — and the arid language of accounting just isn’t meaningful enough in a time when people are demanding that companies become what we call “the social enterprise.” If leaders can articulate goals that connect to purpose and meaning, they won’t need to micromanage anyone. Everyone will be working to the same tune already.

Technology assists stretch performance.

The spin studio's custom-made bikes have always been a source of differentiation for the company, and recently, they have been completely redesigned to enhance their effect. But the bikes don’t include computers or performance measurement data. At SoulCycle, the technology is all about performance — your performance and how hard you push yourself. There are no generic metrics that track how you’re doing against your peers; it’s about your personal journey and how you find meaning and inspiration.

Likewise, the technology that we provide to the workforce shouldn’t be primarily aimed at measuring employee performance in a silo. We don’t need to monitor every move people make, and we shouldn’t distract them with measurement for the sake of measurement. Instead, we need to give employees technological enablers that help them achieve stretch performance. We need technology that can support them in their quest to become more productive.

As important, we must provide people with technology that can help them to improve and grow. We refer to this as “reskill and upskill.” The rapid evolution in work demands has driven learning and development to the top of the list in our recent Trends survey. Yet, even though 86% of respondents said L&D is important, only 10% believe their companies are “very ready” to address it. We can use technology to embed learning in the flow of work, and that’s where it needs to be if our people are going to keep up in a fast-changing business environment.

Leaders deliver personalized inspiration.

My spin instructors are the anthesis of the stereotypical fitness instructors. Sure, they are high-energy, hard-cycling people, but they don’t beat performance out of the riders. They meet us at whatever level of fitness we occupy — and encourage and support us as we surpass our limits. The instructors aren’t cookie-cutter managers, either. They go through the same training programs and share a core set of values, but they bring their authentic selves every day. Take for instance my favorite instructor Martha. If you want to talk about challenging convention and assumptions about what a leader is capable off, she’s the instructor on the podium setting the pace for the class, the instructor who then leaves the front of the room to offer one-on-one guidance, inspiring an individual in their own unique struggle, or the one who clips into a bike among the riders, cycling side-by-side to share her energy.

Today’s leaders need to act in many of the same ways. The top-down, command-and-control model is dead, even if many leadership development programs are still teaching it. Unfortunately, we’ve got a ways to go before the old ways are fully supplanted.

Leaders need to meet employees where they are. To personalize the employee experience, we need to make it a human experience. Sometimes we need to lead. Other times we need to provide one-on-one coaching. And often, we need to roll up our sleeves and dig into the work. This is the foundation of our ability as leaders to enable people to do their best work in a way that works for them. We shape the employee experience to meet the needs and abilities of individuals.

So, take a moment and imagine that we leaders transformed work for our teams into an experience as energizing and unifying as the SoulCycle experience. What could we accomplish together?

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