Appleton Greene & Co – Energy Leadership
Service objectives
Appleton Greene & Co The following list represents the Key Service Objectives (KSO) for the Appleton Greene & Co Energy Leadership service.
Emotional Awareness
Appleton Greene & Co The concept of emotional contagion includes the influence one person’s emotions can have on another. At work, employees tend to mimic the leader’s behaviors. Leaders and strong personalities can have a positive or negative emotional contagious effect on an individual’s thoughts, attitudes and behaviors (TAB). A single interaction can have a rippling effect, shifting a person’s TAB from negative to positive or positive to negative. For example, during a focus group, an employee stated having a feeling of incompetence, having been uninspired and emotionally drained when working for a leader who emitted negative energy. The leader had an unwelcoming attitude and made negative comments about the employees’ work. When a new leader took charge, the employee’s feelings shifted to enthusiasm and appreciation for his/her work, as the leader’s words were encouraging, his/her attitude was pleasant, and his/her positive energy made people feel at ease. The new leader challenged the employee, expressing trust in the employee’s capabilities to do a good job. Acts of attitude and behavior are the physical manifestation of the emotional responses we have to thoughts and feelings. Thoughts, attitudes and behaviors carry an energy that can be contagious and attract the same energy source in others. Leaders have the responsibility of capturing the participation of every team member. Participation should not only be skills related, but also mindful, alert, and engaged, with a temperament of commitment and loyalty to the function and the specified processes and procedures. Positive Energy Awareness (PEA) equips leaders with tools for strengthening the intuitive sense for recognizing the difference between positive and negative thinking associated with emotional contagion. Leaders are in a position to bring vision, understanding, clarity, and agility to the environment and create a positive momentum for change. Meeting the challenge requires leaders to not only have a positive mindset, but to also be consistently mindful of shifts in one’s own emotional state when interacting with others. When leaders interact with others, they trigger emotions that either stimulate or dampen behaviors—many times at the subconscious level. A leader’s ability to intentionally channel positivity contributes to developing a healthy, productive, and harmonious workplace. The concept of emotional contagion serves to enlighten leaders on the impact their behavior has on others. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great wrote “leaders of good-to-great companies respond with thoughtfulness and creativity driven by a compulsion to turn unrealized potential into results”. PEA’s objective is to partner with leaders to develop and create a positive work environment. Appleton Greene & Co
Energy Awareness
Appleton Greene & Co Energy is defined as the ability to do work, or as taken from Merriam Webster, “energy is the capacity of acting or being active”. Energy is what moves a person to get out of bed and come to work. Energy permeates throughout the company or organization and gets defined by the emotional and physical contributions of every employee. Energy awareness is knowing that your energy is the vibrating force that contributes to the external expression of internal emotions. Emotion is derived from the Latin word “emotere which literally means energy in motion. Emotion is the experience of energy moving through the body. Energy awareness is being mindful of the “from-inside-out dynamic” and knowing if the emotions being felt are boosting or draining energy. Leaders with this awareness have more opportunity to be in control of choosing to maintain or change the current impact emotions are having on energy and on those being led. The Positive Energy Awareness (PEA) objective is to raise consciousness of the power emotional energy has on the company or organization. The compelling aspect of energy is the vibrational ability to attract like-energy. Energy transmits in the form of vibrational waves: familiar forms would be sound, radio, heat, and the not so commonly known thought waves. Thoughts trigger emotions that result in energy-carrying responses. Thoughts carry two types of energy vibrations, positive and negative. Negative thoughts result in corresponding emotional responses of incompetence, lack of inspiration, sadness, close mindedness, and fear, to name only a few. The corresponding emotions for positive thoughts would include, but are not limited to joy, excitement, courage, drive, inclusion, encouragement, and open mindedness. A Leader’s energy is the driving force behind the company or organization’s ability to achieve greatness. Leaders’ positive or negative energy radiates creating a matched-energy work environment. A leader’s ability to be mindful of the great difference between positive and negative energy gives way to purposefully choosing communication methods that serve to draw out the positive in those being led. PEA methods work to enhance a leader’s conscious ability to be fully mindful of what triggers their own positive or negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Increased energy awareness will enable leaders to be at the root of their emotions and responses, in so doing impacting the organizational environment. Appleton Greene & Co
Conscious Awareness
Appleton Greene & Co Dr. Joe Dispenza, an international lecturer, author, and corporate consultant, provided the following, the brain is the facilitator of both the conscious and subconscious mind. The brain processes 400 billion bits of information every second and consist of four major areas, one of which is the neocortex, the home of the conscious mind. Individual free will, self-awareness, learning, feelings and the recording of life experiences, (also described as the subjective consciousness) reside inside in the neocortex. Surprisingly, the neocortex processes only two thousand bits of information per second. The brain produces and coordinates different aspects of the mind through thought impulses. The conscious mind translates external information into thoughts, which develops into feelings, and are displayed through external emotional behaviors or responses and this cycle takes place in a Nano-second. Awareness of the activities that take place in that Nano-second can be the difference between collaboration and conflict or success and failure or good and great. The conscious mind is the only area of the brain capable of changing how the brain works. Repetitive conscious thought gets housed in the subconscious and only conscious intentional acts can change an existing subconscious thought or feeling. The subconscious accepts whatever the conscious mind chooses to believe, feels, or does this without question or prejudice. The time it takes to consciously change the subconscious depends on the length of time an identified thought, or feeling has existed. The objective of conscious awareness is to educate and enlighten leaders on the intangible human factors that contribute to employee behavior and engagement. The added awareness reminds leaders to be mindful of the ones’ actions, words used and body language when interacting with others, as there is a possibility of energy transfer or emotional contagion. The knowledge of conscious and subconscious processing can aide in the delivery of company messaging, conflict resolution, and in planting positive thoughts that are inspiring, supportive, and galvanizing. The tools of Positive Energy Awareness are grounded in recognizing conscious awareness as a critical component to moving the company or organization to greatness. Appleton Greene & Co
Commitment
Appleton Greene & Co Commitment is a desire to give of oneself. Commitment is a feeling that comes from inside a person’s being. But commitment can be motivated by outside sources. For example, school curricula are designed to educate; the learning comes from the student’s desire to complete each class and to ultimately graduate. In the academic environment, students have instructors that challenge capabilities, motivate, provide support, and take time out of the day to tutor. There are also instructors that appear to be just the opposite; however, the committed student knows the class has an end date. Knowing there is an end date helps the student to stay committed, to give of themselves and to endure the positives and the negatives of school life. In other words, there is a kind of built-in commitment in the school setting. The work environment, however, presents a different scenario. Commitment is not necessarily related to a specific date like graduation, but rather to projects, programs, or events which may be ongoing and have no end date whatsoever. Comparing again to the school environment, instructors are educated on how to teach in an environment assumed to have graduation as motivation; in the work environment, leaders are educated in a chosen field, become subject matter experts and are promoted to management in an environment without a built-in motivator. But that management requires a specific set of leadership skills which the organizational leader may not innately possess and has not studied as a learned skill. Fortunately, skills necessary to produce commitment on the part of employees can be taught to leaders, thus setting in motion the employee commitment needed to keep the organization’s larger goals from being overlooked. Then, to maintain employee commitment in the workplace, leaders need the ability to continue to motivate, to be supportive, and to take time to engage in conversations unrelated to the immediate goal-at-hand. In a 2016 nationwide company study, 96 percent of the employees surveyed reported motivation as a contributing factor to feeling a sense of meaning in the workplace. Words, body language, and attitude are all the elements of conversation that connect with the feeling side of a person. To help employees maintain high levels of commitment it takes more than pay for performance; a leader’s awareness of the soft side of leadership is equally, if not more, important than subject matter capabilities if commitment is to be maintained. Commitment is not learned, it is, instead, an implicit tenet of one’s self. It comes from inside a person and is driven by the person’s energy to succeed. But commitment can be engendered through a leader acquired and applied skills. It is the objective of Positive Energy Awareness to partner with leaders to develop ways to incorporate a commitment mindset into an organization’s culture. Appleton Greene & Co
Change
Appleton Greene & Co The only constant in life is change. It is an old adage and is undoubtedly true within the organization. In the organizational environment, change is an anticipated occurrence. Borrowing a quote from Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world”. When change takes place, a leader’s effective communication skills present the difference between committed employee alignment and disorder. A leader’s communication regarding change needs to be more than scripted words. The words used, body language and behaviors contribute to how well or poorly the energy of the communicated message is transmitted. Positive Energy Awareness (PEA) is intended to give leaders additional choices of action to take when communicating change. John Kotter, author of Heart of Change, postulated: at the heart of change are emotions. An employee’s initial reaction to change within the organization comes from a place of feeling, creating a personal emotional response. The communication of organizational change is not to change employees, it is to change behavior related to the change; or as Kotter wrote “helping them to see a truth to influence their feeling”. Leaders are not devoid of feeling when organizational changes take place and as such, a self-check prior to communicating to others should be a standard, not only during change, but as a conscious all-time practice. A leader’s mindful awareness of the human factors associated with change will have an impact on the methods used to communicate. Taking the time to conduct a self-check provides the opportunity to deliberately choose positivity over negativity. The leader’s energy, positive or negative, radiates creating a matched environment. That energy is either disjointed as related to challenges, or it is coherent as related, solving the challenges of organizational change collaboratively. A more detailed discussion was presented in the Energy and Emotion Awareness objectives. The objective of PEA is to bring another layer of knowledge, experience, educational resources and tools (i.e., assessments) to the leadership community and to develop the processes most suitable for having a positive impact on the organizational environment. Appleton Greene & Co
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