Managers don’t manage “performance.” They manage team energy.

This post will probably be fairly short — I haven’t blogged in a few days due to a couple of different reasons, and mostly I wanted to dip my toe back in the water — and it’s probably somewhat similar to “management isn’t intuitive,” but here’s the essential idea.

If you lined up 100 people who are managers of others in their companies — and let’s say you do it across different organizations, different industries, etc. — and you asked them this question below, what do you think they’d say?

What exactly do you manage?

I would assume most would blurt out something this:

• Deliverables!
• Process!
• Targets!
• Performance!
• Goals!
• Priorities!
• Revenue streams!
• P&L!

All of those answers are right, and they’re also all horribly wrong.

When you manage other people — which means, at some base level, you are responsible for how they feel/perceive about their workday, which might be 1/3 of their life — you want to make sure they hit targets, yes, but you’re really managing the energy of your team and people.