Originally published on Forbes.com

A professional service team’s performance is usually a reflection of the team leader’s energy field. Over the years, in coaching hundreds of service teams, I’ve noticed that every team leader projects a unique energy field. No two leaders have ever had the same one. In my experience, a leader’s energy field is the number one factor that determines team performance.

An energy field, simply put, is what it feels like to be around that leader. It’s invisible, like a forcefield, but it’s incredibly powerful. If you want to increase your team’s performance and productivity, I recommend that you enhance your energy field. What’s the link between a leader’s energy field and team productivity? In a word—trust.

An effective energy field fosters trust while an ineffective energy field erodes trust. When a team trusts their leader, they’ll go through hell and high water to ensure the team wins. But when a team doesn’t trust their leader, they’ll do the minimum possible to keep their jobs. Trust is the ultimate determinant of team productivity. Strong team trust, along with a dash of good strategy, will produce outstanding results.

How Can You Understand Your Energy Field?

I find that leaders are often unaware of how they came to have a certain energy field, how it impacts team members and what they can do to improve it. So I’d like to put forward a key concept. An energy field is created during interaction, usually personal encounters, but it can also be through written communication.

Your energy field is the cumulative effect of how team members feel after interacting with you over time. If they consistently feel encouraged, focused, supported, uplifted, clear about what to do next and certain about how to handle complex situations, then your energy field is working well. But if they frequently feel deflated, talked down to, unsupported, discouraged or confused about next steps, then your energy field could use some work.

What Contributes To Your Energy Field?

Over the years, I’ve come to identify four factors that give rise to energy fields:

• Verbal communication
• Nonverbal communication
• Positive behaviors
• Negative behaviors

Verbal communication has to do with the actual words leaders use. Most leaders I’ve coached are quite careful with the words they choose because they know that team members are prone to hear a subtext—a set of messages they didn’t intend to send. But the biggest mistake I’ve seen is unwarranted confidence that a message sent is a message received. Often this is not true.

One of the biggest reasons team members struggle to hear a message is because they’re interpreting nonverbal cues. While a leader is focusing on the words, the team is focusing on the leader. They’re reading the leader’s tone of voice, pitch, pacing, facial expressions, body posture and attitude. Nonverbal cues communicate just as much, if not more, than the message.

To help leaders master their use of nonverbal cues, I like to engage them in an exercise. I give them a couple of common scenarios and a pre-drafted message. This allows them to focus 100% on delivery. Then I video-record them delivering the message. On playback, we review together how their nonverbal communication can be improved so the actual message—the words—are better received.

An energy field is also defined by positive and negative behaviors. Some positive behaviors that foster trust include:

• Having a formal process by which you get to know individual team members
• Setting aside one-on-one time with each team member at least once a month
• Taking the time to clarify what someone meant when you’re unsure of their message
• Soliciting input from all team members during meetings so everyone’s voice is heard
• When arbitrating a dispute, giving each person up to seven minutes of uninterrupted time to state their side of things
• Whenever possible, handling issues with teammates privately

Some negative behaviors that erode trust include:

• Being too busy to routinely meet one-on-one with teammates
• Being brusque instead of patient, especially when your schedule is overloaded
• Coming down hard on people for innocent mistakes, where the punishment exceeds the “crime”
• Publicly reprimanding teammates in front of their peers. This is not only embarrassing for them, it creates resentment against you
• Making judgment calls before all of the facts are in, especially as it relates to who bears responsibility when things go wrong
• Repeatedly discounting the input and perspectives of individual teammates

How To Enhance Your Energy Field

If you want to improve your energy field, here are some things to try:

• Limit team size. I’m a big believer that most teams really can’t have good team dynamics if there are more than seven to 10 people on the team. I know this can lead to operational and governance challenges. But in my experience, it’s so worth it.
• Have a formal strategy for getting to know your people beyond just their professional life. Get to know them as people. I help my client team leaders develop a set of questions for these sessions that respect employee privacy policies while also fostering trust and intimacy.
• Make time for teammates every month. These often serve as a pressure relief valve where teammates can talk about little things that have disgruntled them over the last month. As leaders, much of the time, our job is not to solve problems but instead to simply listen.
• Take the time to listen and clarify that what you heard is what someone meant to say.
• Bite your tongue. Far too often, the first thing we want to say could be the most damaging. The more nuanced our responses, the less damage we’ll do.
• Improve your nonverbal communication. Consider the exercise I noted above where you video-record yourself delivering a message. This can be uncomfortable, but you might just identify one or two simple things you can change that will improve trust.

A leader’s energy field is a huge determinant in how much their teammates trust them. When a team trusts their leader, they’ll bend over backward to see the team win.

About The Author

Randy Shattuck is a seasoned entrepreneur who works hand-in-hand with senior leaders of mid-size professional service firms to grow revenues, acquire clients, open new markets, increase profits and effectively position their brands.