Energy is the Asset Organizations are Wasting
Your organization tracks budgets down to the dollar.
It tracks headcount, capacity, and utilization rates with precision.
And yet, the resource that determines whether all of that gets used well, the attention, engagement, and decision-making capacity available to the people running things every day, goes almost entirely unmanaged.
The most familiar name for it is energy, though the term tends to call to mind wellness programs more than operational strategy.
Functionally, it behaves like any other finite asset: it gets spent, and it runs out. And like any other finite resource, how it’s allocated determines what an organization is capable of producing.
Where this asset lives
Three specific, spendable resources make up this account: attention, presence, and decision-making capacity.
A leader has a limited amount of each available on any given day. Every meeting, every interruption, every decision deferred until it becomes urgent draws from the same finite pool.
The catch is that this “account” concentrates disproportionately at the leadership level.
A team’s output depends on the quality of attention its leader can bring to the decisions that shape it, not just whether decisions get made, but whether they’re made with enough clarity and presence to be good ones.
When energy runs low, the effects travel downstream: slower approvals, vague direction, decisions made under depletion and stress rather than keen and skilled judgment.
How organizations are currently spending it
Left unmanaged, energy gets spent reactively rather than deliberately.
Attention goes to whatever is loudest, not whatever is most important. Presence gets fragmented across a calendar built by other people’s requests rather than a leader’s own priorities. Decisions get made in the leftover mental space at the end of a depleted day, when judgment is weakest and the stakes are often highest.
An organization that would never let its budget get spent haphazardly but routinely lets its leaders’ attention get spent exactly this way is gambling with the one resource it can’t replace.
Personal management versus organizational strategy
From the inside, this might look like nothing more than a full calendar and a strong work ethic.
But protecting an individual leader’s energy is a personal skill, while treating that energy as a shared organizational resource is a structural decision. The first might mean a leader guarding a few hours of focused time. The second means an organization actively designing around the reality that its leaders’ attention and decision-making capacity are limited, valuable, and easily misallocated by the way work gets structured around them.
An individual leader can manage their own calendar well and still be operating inside a system that routes every low-priority decision through them, fills their day with meetings that could have been resolved without them, and treats their availability as unlimited by default.
Personal discipline can’t fix a structural default.
What treating energy as an asset requires
Once energy is understood as a finite, spendable resource, the questions change.
Instead of asking how to get more of it, the better question is what it’s currently being spent on, and whether that’s the best use of it. Instead of asking how to recover faster, the better question is what it would take to design work so recovery is needed less often in the first place.
Treated as a business asset, energy is something organizations are responsible for allocating well, not something leaders are left to manage privately and hope holds up.
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