When you interact with the leader of your organization, what happens to your energy: is it recharged, does it run out, is it drained, or is it endangered?

Kim Cameron, co-founder of the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations, has dedicated the past 10 years of his work to discovering what is the most important component of leadership for predicting an organization’s success.

He has concluded that it is positively energizing leadership, which he explains during his masterclass at the ninth Wellbeing 360 event.

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Energizing leadership

“Leaders are the only important factor in accounting for an organization’s success,” he says.

How can we identify the leaders within an organization? The traditional way dictates that it is the person who is at the top of the organizational chart. Another way is to find out who holds all the information.

The alternative proposed by Kim Cameron is through energy. If we see the organization as a network of energies, who is energizing whom? Who is energized by whom?

But it is not about physical, emotional, or mental energy because these diminish as they are used. Cameron refers to the only type of energy that increases through use: relational energy.

“It’s the type of energy that’s exchanged between individuals and their interactions. You measure it by simply answering the question: When I interact with this person, what happens to my energy?

This means that there is not a single leader, but rather that there can be many in different positions on the organizational chart. And the more the better.

Top performing organizations have at least three times more positive energizers than normal organizations. (Photo: Courtesy)

Benefits of a positive energizer

If a person gives positive energy to others, this results in increased performance and greater productivity, according to the results of Cameron’s research.

“The most important finding in the research is that positive energizers not only perform better, but that their position in the positive energy network is four times more important in predicting performance than their position in the influence network or in the information network,” he says.

In addition, all those who interact with a positive energizer are affected and their performance improves too.

“The best performing organizations have at least three times more positive energizers than other organizations,” explains the researcher at the Center for Positive Organizations.

Kim Cameron’s Center for Positive Organizations analyzed 40 financial institutions, provided them with instructions on what to implement, and observed their performance rate over a period of two years.

“The financial performance of companies that implemented energizing leadership was four to five times higher than the industry average,” he shares.

Cameron also led a further study with 30 hospitals using the same process, and these improved almost 10 times more than the industry average.