How Much Energy Is Your Team Wasting on a Future That Hasn’t Happened Yet?
One of the conversations I find myself having quite regularly with leaders is about where their energy is going.
Not just their physical energy, but their mental energy. What are they thinking about? What are they talking about? What are their people talking about? And how much of it is actually going towards something they can influence or control?
This came up in a coaching conversation recently with a leader whose organisation is experiencing uncertainty at the top level of management as they anticipate the arrival of a new CEO. People don't necessarily know what the future structure will look like, and naturally that uncertainty has started to create a lot of questions: What does this mean for us? What will the new CEO do? Will they change this? What happens if they change that? What if our team is affected?
These aren't ridiculous questions. They're very human questions.
The problem is that we can become so caught up in the what ifs, the what coulds and the what might happens that we end up catastrophising about an imaginary future that hasn't even happened yet. And while we're busy spending all of that energy over there, we can lose sight of what's happening right here. That was the interesting part of this particular conversation.
Sitting on the wall behind this leader was the organisation's strategic plan. It very clearly outlined why the organisation exists and what it is there to deliver. None of that had changed. The person at the top might change and the organisational structure might eventually change and there may well be decisions made in the future that affect the team… but right now?
The job is still the job.
The community and customers they serve don't really care who the new CEO is, they care that the service gets delivered. They care that someone answers the phone, turns up, solves the problem, keeps things moving and does what the organisation exists to do. In the absence of leadership certainty, BAU is the certainty: Business As Usual.
And I think we sometimes underestimate how stabilising that can be for people.
Bring people back to what they can control
When uncertainty starts to take over the conversation, one of the most useful things a leader can do is help people separate what they have control over from what they don't. It can literally be as simple as asking:
Do we have any control over that? No? Okay. Park it.
What do we have control over? That's where we redirect the energy.
We can keep the lights on, keep delivering the service, communicate consistently, collaborate and support each other. We can do our jobs really well and when the next layer of leadership is ready to give us direction or tell us something has changed, they'll tell us. Until then, we keep rolling.
That was essentially the conversation I had with this leader. Stop spending so much energy over there, where you currently have no control, and bring it back over here, where you do. That's not ignoring risk or sticking your head in the sand or pretending change isn't happening. If there is something you genuinely need to prepare for, then prepare for it.
But there is a difference between preparing for something you know is coming and repeatedly worrying about something you've imagined might happen. One is useful - the other just burns energy - and that energy has to come from somewhere.
If your people are spending their day discussing decisions that haven't been made, structures that don't exist and consequences that haven't happened, that's energy they're not putting into their customers, their work, each other or the things they actually have the ability to influence.
Helping people recognise that distinction is a leadership skill.
Control the controllables
Anyone who has spent any time in sport has probably heard a coach say, control the controllables. I certainly heard it enough throughout my sporting career, although that didn't necessarily mean I was always very good at doing it. In fact, this was something I struggled with a lot as an athlete because the thing I desperately wanted to control was the outcome. I wanted to win. I wanted the result. I wanted the time on the clock to tell me that all the work had been worth it. The problem is, the outcome was never completely within my control.
The only things I could control was the process - how I trained, how I prepared, how I recovered and how I responded under pressure. What I did in that moment, and then the next one, and then the one after that. Sport teaches you pretty quickly that the moment your attention gets too far ahead of you, you stop paying attention to what you need to do right now.
We saw an extraordinary example of that in the AFL Grand Final on the weekend. Fremantle were 17 points up with less than five minutes remaining. For anyone watching, the outcome looked almost decided. Then Brisbane kicked four unanswered goals and won the Premiership by seven points. Think about what has to happen mentally for a team to do that.
At 17 points down with only minutes left in a Grand Final, focusing on the outcome isn't particularly useful. If your thinking goes to we're going to lose the Grand Final, you've left the moment you're actually standing in and gone into a future that hasn't happened yet.
In that moment, the only useful question is: What do I need to do right now? Win this contest. Make this tackle. Take this mark. Hit this target. Kick this goal. Then do it again.
Charlie Cameron kicked one. Zac Bailey kicked another. Logan Morris kicked the next two, including the goal that put Brisbane in front. Four goals at the very end of a Grand Final turned what looked like a certain Fremantle premiership into Brisbane's third in a row.
I don't know what was being said inside the heads of those Brisbane players, so I won't pretend I do. But the game itself is such a powerful illustration of the principle. Until the final siren sounds, the outcome hasn't happened yet. All you can do is keep coming back to the process and execute the next thing that is within your control.
The arena of work isn't really that different from the arena of sport.
We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to control outcomes like whether the restructure will happen, whether we'll get the promotion, whether senior leadership will approve something or whether somebody will recognise our work when all we need to do is bring ourselves back to exactly the same place and question an athlete does:
What's the next thing that's actually mine to do?... then do that really well.
There's another side to where we put our focus
Earlier in the same coaching conversation, we had been talking about something that initially seemed quite different. One of the people in the team had made the comment that they didn't celebrate their successes enough.
The leader's immediate reaction was essentially, Are you kidding me?
They deliberately start team meetings by talking about wins. They regularly acknowledge what's working. They create opportunities for people to share successes. Yet somehow, that person's perception was still, “we don't celebrate enough”. As a leader, that comment from that person tells you something really important about where their attention was going. No matter how much they celebrate the wins as a team, this person still couldn’t see or hear the acknowledgement and there is a biological reason for this.
As human beings, it is so much easier for us to scan the horizon looking for the threat than it is to look down at where our feet are standing and acknowledge how far we've already come. We are very good at noticing the complaint, the difficult customer, the mistake, the thing that hasn't happened yet, the person who isn't performing, the process that isn't working or the recognition we didn't receive. We don't need much encouragement to find what's wrong.
Seeing what's right often requires more conscious effort.
In the coaching conversation I described it as a conscious skill: being able to help someone shift their focus from everything that's wrong, challenging or not quite right and offer them another perspective by asking them to look at the evidence and find: What have we actually achieved here?
And that's where these two conversations actually connect. They're both about focus.
What happens when nobody else notices the good work?
The leader also talked about the frustration their team sometimes feels because the work they do doesn't always receive the attention or acknowledgement they would like from elsewhere in the organisation.
They've sent the information through to senior leaders and the internal comms team, shared the success, told the story, but for whatever reason, it hasn't necessarily been picked up or communicated more broadly. That can be deflating, particularly when people have worked hard and are proud of what they've achieved. But again, where do you have control in this situation?
I had another coaching conversation this morning as part of the Leaders Unleashed Sprint HURDLES program I'm currently delivering for SLSQ, and a leader gave me a brilliant example of this.
We were talking about what happens when you successfully roll out something like a software upgrade or deliver a public service and everything works exactly as it is supposed to and what do you hear? Nothing. Dead silence.
And we laughed about the idea that sometimes, dead silence is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Nobody rings IT to say, Just wanted to let you know the system worked beautifully this morning. Nobody contacts a public service provider to say, Everything happened exactly when and how I expected it to happen today. Excellent work.
We tend to say something when the system goes down, the service doesn't arrive, something breaks or we're inconvenienced. But when everything works?
Silence.
Which means there are teams all over organisations doing good work every single day whose greatest evidence of success may be that nobody is talking about them.
Sometimes you have to teach your people to see the absence of noise differently. Instead of interpreting nobody said anything as nobody noticed or what we did didn't matter, sometimes the evidence of good work is that the thing simply worked. The upgrade happened and nobody complained. The service was delivered and nobody had to escalate anything. The process did exactly what it was designed to do.
That's a win! And if nobody else is going to stop and acknowledge it, then perhaps part of our job as leaders is to make sure we do. You have control over what you feed in. You can tell people about the work. You can share the result. You can communicate the success and make sure the right information has been provided. You don't have control over what happens after that.
So if the external validation doesn't come, does that mean the achievement somehow matters less? No. This is where leaders need to be very careful that they don't outsource all of their team's sense of success to someone else. If nobody outside the team celebrates it, celebrate it anyway. If nobody sends the congratulatory email, acknowledge it anyway. If the story never makes it into the company newsletter, talk about it anyway.
Your team still solved the problem, delivered the result, improved the process or supported the customer. Or perhaps they handled something better than they would have six months ago. That evidence doesn't disappear simply because nobody else applauded it.
Celebrating wins isn't fluffy. It's a focus tool.
I think this is the part we sometimes misunderstand about recognition. Celebrating success isn't about sitting around telling everyone how wonderful they are. It's about making sure the team's picture of reality includes what's working as well as what isn't.
If all we ever talk about is the next problem, the next complaint, the next risk, the next restructure and the next thing that needs fixing, eventually that's what the workplace starts to feel like.
Problem. Problem. Problem. Problem.
Yet sitting right alongside those problems may be an enormous amount of good work that has become invisible because everybody has already moved on to the next thing. Leaders can change that. You can remind people to actually, look at what we did here: that difficult situation was handled well, that process worked exactly as it was supposed to, that person stepped up and that customer got a good outcome. We dealt with something that would have completely derailed us twelve months ago and this time we handled it.
Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.
The point isn't to pretend the problems don't exist. It's to make sure they aren't the only thing people can see.
Where you help people put their attention is leadership
You won't always be able to give your people certainty and you won't always know what's going to happen next, just like you won't be able to control every decision being made above you, and you certainly can't guarantee that somebody else will notice every piece of good work your team does. What you can do is keep bringing people back to where their feet are standing:
What's true right now?
What are we here to do?
What can we actually control?
What are we doing well?
What evidence do we have that we're making progress?
And where are we wasting energy on something that may never even happen?
Those questions are simple, but being able to use them well is part of learning how to lead humans, particularly when things around them feel uncertain. It's also the kind of practical leadership capability we work on through the Leaders Unleashed programs. Not leadership as theory, but understanding what's happening in the people around you, recognising where their thinking and behaviour are taking them, and having the tools and confidence to help redirect them when needed.
A lot of the time leadership isn't about having an answer for the uncertain future, it's about being the person who can bring everyone back to the present and say: We don't know what is going to happen next, but we do know what our job is today and that's where we're putting our energy.
