You know the meeting I mean. Everyone around the table is capable, the agenda is sensible, and the plan you gave the board still makes sense on paper. Yet the conversation feels heavier than it should, two of your directors address each other through you, and when you leave the room you can feel that something has quietly drained out of the business without anyone being able to say what it was.
Most leaders respond to that feeling by asking for more effort. The instinct is understandable and almost always wrong, because energy inside a leadership team doesn’t add up the way effort does. It multiplies, and in a multiplication a single low number drags everything else down with it.
Energy Is The Signal You Read Last
In this week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork I make the case that energy is the earliest warning a leadership team will ever give you that something has started to set. It appears months before the missed target, in the high performer who has stopped volunteering ideas and in the decisions that keep drifting back up to your desk.
The person at the top is usually the last to see it. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that the ratings given by the people around an executive were fourteen times more predictive of their division’s success than the executive’s own self-assessment. You are, in other words, a poor judge of the energy you bring into a room,.
I learned this from a horse long before I read it in a report. During my years at Arthur Andersen, my horse Toby would walk away every time I came into his field after a week in the office. He was reading the pushing, outward energy I carried with me, and it took me a long time to accept that my team had been reading exactly the same thing. The only difference was that they couldn’t walk away.
The Relationship Everybody Routes Around
The most expensive energy leak in a leadership team rarely belongs to one person. It sits between people.
Every leadership team I work with has at least one relationship that others have quietly learnt to route around. Information travels around it rather than through it, and within a year that workaround has become the way the business actually operates. The same research suggests that one draining relationship offsets four energising ones, so your best partnerships may be doing little more than cancelling out your worst.
This is what I mean by entrenched leadership dynamics. These patterns made sense once and now hold the business back, reinforcing themselves one tiring conversation at a time.
When The System Cancels The Leader
You can develop every personal skill in the book and still lead inside a system that cancels your effort out.
When your reward structure sets teams against each other for budget or credit, energy rises inside each team and falls away between them. I see this most often after acquisitions, where the founders of an acquired firm are still on earn-outs tied to their old profit and loss. They are being paid to protect exactly what the integration needs them to let go of, and no resilience programme will touch a problem whose cause is structural.
What The Herd Does Differently
When a herd of horses senses danger, it runs together, and when the danger has passed, it goes back to grazing. The herd doesn’t spend the afternoon resenting the predator. Most leadership teams I meet are still carrying the residue of an argument from two budget rounds ago, which puts a small, unnamed tax on every meeting between them.
In the episode I also share the story of a client and a big grey horse called Marchador, which shows what happens when what you say and what you intend pull in opposite directions. And I make a confession about the formula at the heart of my own book, Unbridled Business, which I now believe I got wrong.
Three Questions Worth Asking This Week
Start by asking the people around you, rather than yourself, what energy you brought into your last leadership meeting. Then name the one relationship in your senior team that people quietly work around, because you almost certainly know which one it is already. Finally, look hard at your reward structure and ask whether it is paying your leaders to defend the very boundaries you need them to cross.
Before Your 2027 Plan Locks
Before you commit to next year’s growth targets, check whether your leadership team can actually deliver them. Listen to the full episode, Energy Does Not Add Up. It Multiplies, on Impactful Teamwork.
If you would rather start on your own, take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and see whether your leadership team’s three levers are moving in step. Or join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here
Show Notes
00:49 Missed Episode Wakeup
01:44 Slow Leaks and Signals
03:46 Energy Equation Report
05:08 Energy Beats Time
06:34 Multiplying Team Energy
10:01 Your Energy Blind Spot
10:55 Horse Lessons on Presence
14:45 Energy and Focus Matrix
15:52 De Energizing Relationships
20:06 Collective Energy Systems
20:57 Incentives and Integration Trap
22:14 Uneven Load Shared Leadership
24:26 Borrowed Energy and AI
26:50 Observation and Safety Gaps
27:59 Horses Reveal Team Dynamics
28:42 Three Level Weekly Challenge
