Have you ever felt that your teams are low on energy? You might have even noticed that interactions among team members have become increasingly aggressive. There are several indicators that often suggest the team’s energy is lower than usual:
- Difficulty completing tasks that are typically easy for the team
- Lack of initiative when proposing ideas
- Limited participation in meetings (especially retrospectives)
- Increased aggression in conversations
- Elevated level of toxicity within the team
When any of these symptoms start to show, it might be time to gather the entire team to inspect how we are managing our energy. Thus, we seek the best moment for this exercise, which can be during a retrospective or simply creating a dedicated meeting where we can have focused time with the team.
It’s important to take a few minutes at the beginning with the team to explain that every day we do things that recharge our energy and things that drain our energy. Take a moment for each team member to individually think about how full their energy tank is at that moment. According to Tom Rath, author of “Are You Fully Charged?”, only 11% of people feel they had a lot of physical energy throughout their day.
When I’ve worked on this with my teams, I ask them to individually identify the following:
- Tasks that recharge their energy at home
- Tasks that recharge their energy at work
- Tasks that drain their energy at home
- Tasks that drain their energy at work
We put one idea on each post-it note and share them on a prepared board with the four quadrants. Up to this point, we’ve only identified data; the value of the activity comes in the next part where we start the conversation.
In this part, I focus on asking the team:
- Which ideas are repeated?
- Which energy-recharging tasks can help balance out the energy-draining ones?
- Which energy-draining tasks do we need to maintain?
- Which energy-draining tasks can we discard?
- What actions can we take as a team to eliminate tasks that drain our energy?
Along with the four quadrants, I maintain a section on the board to identify those actions that we’ll discover as a team, which will help us boost energy levels in our day-to-day and with our teammates.
What can we achieve?
With this exercise, we might achieve:
- Increased empathy among team members
- Identification of waste we can eliminate in our workflow
- Recognition of energy-draining obstacles and how to eliminate them
- Getting to know each other and having fun as a team
If you give it a try, I’d love to hear how it goes, what you discover that you didn’t know before, and if it proves valuable for the team.
See you…
Agile506 