Joy & Tension Creates a Winning Work Environment

What is great leadership?

• Smarts?
• Charis­ma?
• Strate­gic thinking?
• Finan­cial accomplishment?
• Enthu­si­asm?

Those things can con­tribute to some­one being a great leader, but alone are not enough.

There are many good books on lead­er­ship, but my great­est insights about lead­er­ship come from the suc­cess­ful CEOs that I get to wit­ness in action – they all have things in com­mon: They cre­ate a win­ning work envi­ron­ment where peo­ple grow because they feel good and bad.

Sim­ple isn’t it? Grow tal­ent by mak­ing them feel good (win­ning) and bad (tough lessons).

The best way I can think of this is ​“Joy and Tension”.

Joy best cap­tures the feel­ing some­one has when they win and/​or get rec­og­nized for doing some­thing well. Ten­sion is the feel­ing that some per­son gets inside when they fail to deliv­er as expect­ed or believe they dis­ap­point­ed their leader or colleagues.

The high­est per­form­ing peo­ple I see thrive on the com­bi­na­tion of joy & ten­sion – they get bet­ter & more resilient because the best lead­ers that I’ve seen have mas­tered this and it shows in the growth of their team & business.

Let’s break this down…

What if a leader only cre­ates joy & no ten­sion? Well, their peo­ple will feel com­fort­able in their roles and over­time their per­for­mance becomes mediocre. It’s not that they are bad peo­ple, the envi­ron­ment did not cre­ate enough ten­sion to chal­lenge them & fire them up to keep upgrad­ing their abil­i­ties. Just think of a race horse that always com­petes against slow­er horses…it can slow down & still win…overtime that horse will run more slowly.

On the oth­er side of the equa­tion, imag­ine a leader that did not cre­ate any joy (feel­ing good) but all tension.

There are some very rare ​“A” play­ers that can thrive in this kind of envi­ron­ment but not many.

Usu­al­ly in this sit­u­a­tion, per­for­mance will wane over time as well because the team will emo­tion­al­ly dis­en­gage and say things like ​“They’re nev­er hap­py no mat­ter what I do…why bother?”

The prob­lem here is there is noth­ing on the rela­tion­al bank account to con­nect the team to the leader. The idea of the rela­tion­al bank account is that you make deposits when you cre­ate feel­ings of joy & with­drawals when you cre­ate tension.

Just like with a bank account, you can’t with­draw cash that isn’t there! And, if you have a line of cred­it on that account, you can draw on it but still have to pay inter­est (joy). If you keep with­draw­ing with­out mak­ing any payments/​deposits, soon­er or lat­er the bank will send you to col­lec­tions – the employ­ee will end the relationship.

The best lead­ers under­stand these dynam­ics & man­age their accounts very well.

To be crys­tal clear, there are many ways of cre­at­ing joy & ten­sion and the best ones are not always words com­ing from the CEO or leader’s mouth. The ide­al envi­ron­ment is a com­bi­na­tion of:

• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the CEO/​leader
• Trans­paren­cy of per­for­mance with the team (vis­i­ble KPIs, Rocks & finan­cial per­for­mance as in the Rock­e­feller Habits)
• Inter­nal­ly know­ing when you have per­formed or not
• 3600 feed­back from peers, direct reports & your managers
• Being give more chal­leng­ing projects & the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sink or swim

The key here is that high per­form­ing peo­ple con­tin­ue to thrive in a work envi­ron­ment where there is joy and tension…they fade where there is not.