On managing people's energy

The standard off the shelf management wisdom often goes something like this: “Set up quantifiable KPIs and watch out for burnouts”. And while that sounds sensible, the roots of the problem go way deeper than that. So, today I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this.

What do managers do?

I have said it multiple times in my past articles, but I will repeat it one more time here. The primary purpose of a manager is to manage resources. All other aspects being equal, the best managers apply the available limited resources, well, better.

By resources we usually mean money, the blood of any organisation. And sometimes that translates into human resources and infrastructure as well. But, I dare to say, that it goes further than that. Because people’s motivation plays an enormous role in organisational performance and needs to be managed as well.

Motivation is a complex topic though. There is definitely impact of the culture and belonging. There is definitely the element of purpose, and exploration, and creative expression of a person. But we can look at it from a slightly different perspective.

Everything that humans do is limited by the amount of energy that they can bring to work. That is one of the most important, if not the most important factor that defines an organisation’s performance as a whole. And that makes people’s energy one of the most important resource to manage well.

What energy is made of?

Just like in physics, people’s energy is everywhere in an organisation. It defines everything in an organisation: why people show up for work every day; how far they take their work; how much risk are they willing to take; and what do they do when they face obstacles.

Unlike the real world though, an organisation is not a closed ecosystem. People bring energy into it on the daily basis, and then that energy transforms into products, which in turn transform into profits. Without people brining this energy into the system on a continuous basis, there will be no organisation.

This energy a structure that can be described this way:

• Physical energy
• Emotional energy
• Give-a-fuck energy

When the physical energy runs out, a person is just tired; they can sleep it off. When the emotional energy runs out, a person goes into what’s known as a burnout; they will need a significant break from work to recover. When their give-a-fuck energy runs out, there is no way back; people just resign.

One’s best is not the same

Because of our purpose as managers, we want to use available resources in the most optimal way we can. And, as the result, we want to see the best effort from each individual; hence we would go a long way to make sure that happens.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that people’s best is not the same every day. On some days people are pumped and they can move mountains. On other days they only can chug along at a steady pace. And on some days a person’s best is to just lay face down and do nothing the entire day.

The fallacy here is that we know that a person’s energy fluctuates from day to day and so we average it out. And then two things happen: because nobody can really measure the energy, the “averaging out” is eyeballed to a higher level than it really is; and secondly, the person is implicitly expected to show that at least average level on a daily basis.

Even if we could objectively measure the energy levels, the math doesn’t add up and this system routinely pushes people to overcommit. And then once a person gets out of their way to deliver on those unrealistic expectations, that level of performance becomes the new norm and the whole set of expectations shifts up for everyone. It is not a surprise that the tech industry has an epidemic of burnouts at the moment.

A word on optimality

Now, here is a plot twist. The reason why organisations in tech routinely burn people to the ground is not because people have limits. The primary reason is because is us the managers who are hell bent on building the most optimal systems we can.

When it comes to stability, systems thinking identifies three types of systems:

• Fragile - those crumble under environmental changes. A house of cards is a good example
• Robust - those can take a lot of beating before they fail. An old oil drum for example is a robust system
• Anti-fragile - those become stronger as more pressure applied to them. Diamonds are anti-fragile for example

When a manager sees productivity as their life purpose and they try to apply given resources as optimally as they can, they don’t build robust systems, they build fragile ones. Because any deviation in people’s ability to bring in that energy consistently, or changes in the market’s environment, will inevitably topple that carefully balanced system.

And that brings us to the paradox of management. On one hand it is our purpose to apply resources as optimally as possible. But on the other hand optimally applied resources create fragile systems that inevitably fail and then spend an ungodly amount of energy on recovery; which defies the point.

How the energy is exhausted

Before we go into managing and solutions, I think it’s worth pausing for a second and talk about how the energy is exhausted. Because it’s not as simple as it seems.

We like to think of the system as a straight pipeline: people bring energy into the system and that energy is transformed into products. But, that’s not entirely the case. Because a lot of energy is exhausted into other avenues and keeping track of those is equally important.

The physical energy is, in fact, exhausted into day to day product development. But it literally starts to burn through the people when a team goes on double-time like outages, crunch-time, long term pushing for goals. It is worth to remember that studies show that a person on average has a capacity for only 4 hours of deep focus a day. Pushing people beyond that on a regular basis will burn into their reserves.

The emotional energy depends on the emotional climate within an organisation and starts burning whenever there is drama involved. Emotional energy recovers very slowly too. So, whenever a person runs out of it, they get stuck in a loop of having no energy to deal with the drama and feeling bad about themselves. That’s your basic recipe for a burnout.

The give-a-fuck energy is built of trust and purpose. Whenever either of those is betrayed the give-a-fuck energy gets depleted, and it never really goes back unless an exceptional effort is applied.

How to manage the energy

I hope by now the basic idea is rather clear: we need to manage the three energy levels.

1. Invest into best practices and quality to avoid burning into physical energy
2. Never let organisational dramas linger for longer that necessary
3. Don’t betray your people’s trust in you as a manager, ever

And the most importantly, don’t play efficiency tetris with your resources. Efficient systems are fragile, and that’s not what you want in a multi-year endeavour like a software engineering organisation. Build robust systems, think an oil drum not a house of cards. You can kick an oil drum down the hill for weeks and it will be fine.

And that’s a wrap. See you next week.