How to manage your energy levels?

As marketing leaders, our days are filled with an array of responsibilities - from strategic planning to campaign ideation, budgeting to team management, and more. Some of these tasks naturally energize and motivate us, while others seemingly deplete our reserves (especially as we’re entering the brand planning season!).

A hallmark of strengths is “energy.” When we use our strengths, we feel energized and engaged. Activities that rely on our strengths are enjoyable and feel as if our energy levels are being raised. 

This week I’ve got a great exercise to share with you today called “Energy Checks,” which helps us identify the bright spots and drainers in our roles in order to lead with more inspiration and impact.

Here’s how it works:

Green activities - relying on your leadership strengths

 Green tasks are those that allow us to operate from our natural strengths and talents as leaders. These are activities that: 

■ you genuinely enjoy doing

■ make you feel energized

■ make you forget the time

■ you look forward to

■ you can do well even under conditions of stress or fatigue

Tuning into those leadership activities that truly engage and inspire us is an important first step toward leading from our best self, or when we’re at our best. You show up positive, efficient, innovative, motivated and motivating, inspiring to people around you. 

Red acvities: the leadership energy drainers. 

On the other hand, red activities rely on areas outside of our natural leadership talents and are depleting rather than energizing. These might include:

you do not like doing

■ make you feel depleted

■ seem to pass very slowly

■ you don’t look forward to

■ require a lot of effort and self-control to do well

For some of you, they may be:

• Approving expenses or correcting errors
• Analytical activities like crunching campaign ROI numbers
• Anything highly detailed like reviewing long contracts
• Being stuck in weeds our teams should handle
• Putting out fires or unnecessary meetings

Mind you, some of you might find these super energising, and not draining. We are ALL different, and the same task might be exciting for some, absolutely dreadful for others.

Before I continue, if you’re leading a team of marketers, how well do you know what drains your direct reports and what energise each of them? How can you look at assigning tasks and projects according to this exercise – knowing who will get energised by certain projects and tasks, and therefore be more efficient, bring more value to it?

While certain of these activities you've identified might be inevitable, identifying those that sap our inspiration can help us minimize, delegate, or batch them when possible.

Plotting your marketing activities  

To complete your own Energy Check, grab coloured post-it notes and write down your key leadership responsibilities, recurring projects, and regular tasks, assigning each a red or green post-it. Yellow is fine for more neutral activities. Categorize them based on whether each is more draining or engaging for you.

Looking at your post-its, are most green activities centred around the same strengths like strategic thinking, creative collaboration, or vision creation? Do the red drainers have common themes like budgeting, data analysis, or copy-writing, or perhaps presentation, or team management? This color-coded visualization can quickly shine a light on alignment with your leadership strengths, the ones you can nurture and stretch further with excitement - and where you get bogged down unnecessarily. 

Leading from your sweet spot 

The most powerful result of Energy Checks is realizing just how much of your week centres around draining red activities versus energizing green ones. You can likely raise both your own and your team’s performance dramatically by:

• Delegating more red activities to other capable leaders who get more out of these than you do
• Batching analytical, admin tasks or people management into specific windows
• Scheduling higher payoff green activities first in your calendar
• Building skills in areas like financials that represent red activities for you perhaps
• Exploring promotional opportunities that involve more green functions       

Make it a habit to periodically check in on your leadership activity balance using Energy Checks. Spotting red task creep or untapped green potential can help recharge both you and your marketing machine.

If you lead a team of marketers, do this exercise in your next marketing team meeting, get to know your team, get their level of self-awareness up and share the findings as a group. You might be surprised at how insightful this session is and what actions you can put in place to improve the motivation of your team and increase their performance !

Speak soon,

Magali