Let me be honest with you. I was thinking about this topic on my way to the studio this morning. And I kept coming back to one thing: bringing the energy is probably one of the most underrated, overlooked behaviors in any transformation. Which is exactly why I put it last in the book.
Not because it’s least important. Quite the opposite. It’s because everything else leads to this. All the other behaviors — finding your purpose, building psychological safety, creating courageous leadership — they all feed into one question: are you and your organization actually energized enough to make this journey together?
And the honest answer, in most transformations? Not really. At least not in a sustainable, authentic, contagious way. Let’s talk about why. And more importantly, let’s talk about what you can actually do about it.
Why energy is the invisible ingredient
Think about the last transformation you were part of — or the one you’re running right now. There was probably a strategy deck. A three-year roadmap. A set of KPIs. A launch event with the right music and a motivational speech. Right?
And then three months in, something happened. The daily grind crept back. The urgent started overriding the important. And the people you needed to be excited? They were physically present but emotionally somewhere else entirely.
Sound familiar?
“There are so many employees who feel disengaged the moment they walk through the door. They put their corporate hat on and leave the best version of themselves outside.”
This isn’t a cynicism problem. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that they’ve been through this before. They’ve seen transformations launched with fanfare and quietly shelved eighteen months later. They’ve watched leadership teams preach customer centricity while internal KPIs rewarded something completely different. They’ve learned, rationally and reasonably, not to get too invested.
So when you show up as a leader and say this time it’s different — what makes them believe you? What makes them actually feel it? That’s where bringing the energy comes in. And it starts somewhere you might not expect.
It starts with you.
First, the personal side: know your own energy
Before you can energize anyone else, you have to understand what actually energizes you. This sounds obvious. It’s not.
I’ve worked with leaders who are incredibly skilled, deeply committed, strategically sharp — and yet somehow flat in the room. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve been running on someone else’s version of what a transformational leader should look like. They’re performing energy rather than bringing it. And people can feel the difference. Every single time.
Why does this transformation actually matter to you? Not to the board. Not to your investors. Not as it appears in the strategy document. Why does it resonate with you personally — and what does that give you permission to show up as?
For me, that answer connects to purpose. I genuinely believe that organizations can be different. That you can have a company where people are proud of how they work — not just what they deliver. Where transformation isn’t something that’s done to employees but something that’s built with them. That belief is the source of my energy. When I speak from that place, it lands differently. It always does.
Now, here’s something important. Bringing the energy doesn’t mean being loud. It doesn’t mean being me — and I’ll be the first to admit I can be a lot. It means being authentic. Your version of energized leadership might look very different from mine. Maybe you’re the one who creates energy by asking brilliant questions in the room. Or by building the kind of psychological safety where other people dare to be bold. Or by staying so consistently calm under pressure that you become the anchor everyone else stabilizes around.
All of that is energy. All of it is valid. What it cannot be is fake.
Reflect on your authentic leadership DNA
So take a moment — actually, take more than a moment — to ask yourself a few honest questions. Are you someone who gets energized by being in front of a crowd, or does that drain you? Do you light up when you’re co-creating with a small team, or when you’re setting direction? Do you thrive when you’re challenging the status quo, or when you’re building something that lasts?
The answers matter, because they tell you where to invest your leadership energy. You can’t show up fully if you’re constantly fighting your own nature. The most effective transformational leaders I’ve seen aren’t necessarily the loudest or the most charismatic. They’re the ones who have figured out their own version of “on” — and they show up in that mode, consistently, even when it’s hard.
Then, the collective side: mobilizing your organization
Okay. So you’ve done the inner work. You know why this matters to you. You’ve connected to your purpose and you’ve found your authentic way of leading this transformation. Now what?
Now comes the harder part: translating that individual energy into something the whole organization can feel, share, and sustain.
And this is where I see most transformation programs stumble. They treat the human and the hard sides of transformation as an either/or. You’re either running a data-driven, numbers-led program — or you’re doing the soft stuff around culture and behaviors. As if these two things are opposites. They’re not. They are, in fact, completely dependent on each other.
“If you only go for the hard numbers, you lose the human. If you’re overly focused on the human aspect, you lose all the people who want to know: where are the results?”
The best transformations I’ve been part of do both simultaneously. They translate the “fluffy experience thing” into hard, steerable data — so that leadership teams can have an honest conversation about priorities without one side of the room feeling like their perspective doesn’t count. And at the same time, they invest seriously in the behaviors, habits, and culture that actually drive those numbers over time.
Speak the language of the room you’re in
One thing I’ve learned in 25 years of doing this work: energy doesn’t travel unless it speaks the right language. And every room has a different language.
Maybe your CFO is steering hard on short-term financials. Maybe your board is skeptical of anything that doesn’t have an ROI attached to it within six months. Maybe your frontline employees are exhausted and have heard three transformation announcements in the last four years. These aren’t obstacles to bringing the energy. They’re part of the landscape you have to understand if you want your energy to land.
So for the CFO: show the numbers. We’ve done this. Through driver analysis, we’ve been able to demonstrate that improving personal attention in a customer interaction increases satisfaction five times faster than improving the ease of use of an app. That’s a conversation. That’s something a numbers-led leader can actually act on. You’re not asking for faith — you’re giving them data.
For the skeptics: start small, prove it works, and let the results do the talking. We consistently see that when organizations create voluntary experimentation programs — inviting employees to try new behaviors through things like Tiny Habits — between 33 and 60% of employees join. Voluntarily. That number alone tells a story. It says: people are hungry for this. They want to feel different at work. Give them the chance and they’ll take it.
And for the tired ones? Be honest. Acknowledge the journey ahead is unknown. Don’t pretend you have all the answers. The most energizing thing a leader can sometimes do is say, “I don’t know exactly how we’re going to get there, but I know why it matters, and I’m committed to figuring it out with you.”
Moving away from the three-year roadmap
Let’s talk about transformation models for a second. Because I think this connects directly to energy.
The traditional approach — make a three-year plan, roll it out, measure satisfaction once a year, hope for the best — is, I’ll say it plainly, broken. Not because the people running these transformations aren’t smart. They are. But because the world isn’t cooperating with three-year plans anymore. And honestly? It never was.
The problem with a long-horizon roadmap isn’t just that it’s rigid. It’s that it creates a black box. You set a destination, you start moving, and for the next 36 months you have very little visibility into whether you’re actually moving in the right direction. You’re measuring NPS. You’re looking at satisfaction scores. And when the number comes back — let’s say 7.8 — you think: great. Now what?
Exactly. Now what.
There’s no steering mechanism. No real-time signal that tells you which behaviors are changing, which parts of the culture are shifting, where the transformation is taking root and where it’s stalling. You’re flying blind with good intentions. And that creates an energy crisis, because at some point people stop believing in the destination because they can’t see the progress.
Instead of a fixed roadmap, think in quarterly directions. You still have a destination — becoming more customer centric, or more digital, or more innovative. But you’re learning and iterating as you go. You’re collecting signals constantly. You’re adjusting. That’s not a lack of commitment to the goal. That’s how you actually get there.
And here’s where energy comes back in. When people can see the transformation moving — when they can point to stories changing, behaviors shifting, small wins stacking up — they stay energized. When they’re in a black box for 18 months with no visible progress, they disengage. This isn’t a mystery. It’s just human nature.
Measuring the things that actually matter
So if we’re done with the three-year black box, what do we measure instead?
I think about this in three layers. And this is where I want to get a bit specific, because I’ve seen organizations lose their way here by measuring the wrong things at the wrong stage.
The first layer is your lagging indicators — revenue growth, cost reduction, innovation output. These are the outcomes. You have to get there. But they’re not where you steer from. Watching a lagging indicator and trying to change it is like trying to navigate by looking out the back window.
The second layer is your experience metrics — NPS, satisfaction, engagement. These are better. They’re closer to the signal. But they still don’t tell you what to do. They tell you where you are, not how to move.
The leading indicators — the real steering mechanisms — are the behaviors happening inside your organization right now. Are leaders creating space for honest conversation? Are frontline employees being given the autonomy to act on what they know? Are teams able to tell you stories of what customer centricity looks like in practice — and what’s getting in the way?
That last one is something we’ve been developing. Collecting employee stories at scale — not just anecdotes, but structured narrative data, run through AI to identify patterns — gives you something genuinely new. You can track how those stories are changing quarter by quarter. You can spot where the organizational system is enabling transformation, and where it’s actively blocking it. You can act on it. You’re in the driving seat.
And for me, that combination — driver analysis to steer the experience side, story tracking to steer the transformation side, and Tiny Habits to build the behavioral side — is what it looks like to run a transformation where energy stays alive. Because you can see the movement. You can celebrate it. You can share it.
So, how do you start tomorrow?
I always want to end with something concrete. Not because the conceptual stuff isn’t important — it is — but because transformation that lives only in the conceptual is not transformation. It’s a very expensive PowerPoint.
So here are three things. Let me try to keep it at three.
Start with yourself — pause and find your why
Before you do anything else, take the time to genuinely reflect on why this transformation matters to you. Not the official answer. Your answer. What do you believe about how organizations can work? What do you want to be true about your company in five years? What gets you out of bed for this? Write it down. Say it out loud to someone you trust. Notice how it lands.
Align your leadership team — create a shared storyline
Once you know your own purpose, do the same exercise collectively with your senior team. Have everyone share their why. Then check: are you aligned? Not on the strategy — that’s a different conversation — but on the meaning. On why this actually matters. The organizations that transform successfully tend to have leadership teams that, even though they express energy differently, are telling the same story. The ones that struggle? You can feel the disconnection from the outside. So can your employees.
Have the courage to keep people on the journey
Transformation is an unknown journey. There will be moments where the numbers aren’t where you hoped. Where the board pushes back. Where people get tired. And in those moments, your job as a leader isn’t to pretend everything is fine — it’s to acknowledge the challenge and keep people connected to the purpose. That takes courage. It takes what I call a loving push back: yes, we hear the short-term pressure, yes we will prove the results, and yes — this human-centric direction is where we’re going. Don’t let the first hard moment become the reason the whole thing stalls.
And one more, because I can never really keep it at three: start small, but design to scale. Pick one team, one country, one department. Run the experiment. Prove it works. But from day one, build it in a way that you can replicate. That’s how transformation moves from a pilot to something the whole organization feels.
One last thing
I’ve been thinking about energy for most of my career. And here’s what I keep coming back to.
The leaders who create the most meaningful transformations aren’t necessarily the ones with the best strategy or the biggest budget. They’re the ones who know themselves well enough to show up authentically. Who are curious enough to understand the context of the people around them. And who are open enough to bundle together all the different kinds of energy in the room — the data-driven skeptic, the culture champion, the quiet builder — and say: we need all of this.
You don’t have to do this alone. You don’t have to be the loudest or the most energized person in the building. You just have to know your own energy, take care of it, and share it generously.
When you do that? Amazing things happen.
Let’s go.
