Primary Focus Area
Well-being & Balance
Supporting Focus Area(s)
Openness &Transparency, Constructive Collaboration, Motivation & Drive, Owning Your Impact,
Objective
This activity helps team members reflect deeply on what energizes and drains them in their daily workflow. By surfacing these patterns openly, the team can co-create localized practices that support sustainable performance rather than burnout. The goal isn’t to solve every systemic problem in a single session, but to identify small, actionable adjustments that immediately enhance psychological balance for everyone.
Logistics
- Time: 30–45 Minutes.
- Materials: Index cards or two distinct colors of sticky notes for co-located sessions, or a shared digital whiteboard platform for remote teams.
The Steps
1. Individual Input (5 Minutes) Ask everyone to create two separate categories on their writing surface, utilizing two distinct categories or colored notes to represent Energizers and Drainers.
- Energizers: What gives you focus or motivation? (e.g., “Walking 1:1s,” “Deep work time,” “Solving hard problems,” “Recognition from peers”).
- Drainers: What saps your energy? (e.g., “After-hours emails,” “Unclear priorities,” “Back-to-back meetings, “Lack of recognition”).
Facilitator Directive: “Be entirely honest and highly specific. There are absolutely no wrong answers in this room, and it is completely normal if what drains one colleague happens to energize another.”
2. Sharing & Mapping (15 Minutes) Go around the group or the virtual grid, inviting each person to share one or two key highlights from both of their categories.
- Visual Mapping: Place the notes onto the whiteboard or digital platform to make the collective input visible to all.
- Cluster Analysis: Group the notes together to spot common patterns (for instance, the data might show that the entire team is drained by a specific status meeting, or that everyone is energized by quiet, no-meeting blocks).
Retrospective & Action Planning
Individual Insights (Self-Reflection) Before the group discussion, invite participants to take two minutes to reflect silently and note their reactions to these prompts::
- What did I learn about my own well-being needs and energy triggers?
- What is one proactive step I can take to help others better understand my working style?
- Am I doing anything that unintentionally drains my teammates, such as sending non-urgent messages late at night?
Team Commitments (From Insight to Action) Identifying the drainers is only useful if you plug the leak. Use the ACE Toolkit to fix the friction.
- Set a Goal (The What) To proactively plug your cultural energy leaks, formulate an optimization goal targeted entirely at neutralizing a primary workplace drainer while intentionally expanding your team's capacity to recharge
- Example: “We will mitigate calendar bloat and meeting fatigue so that we can maximize team deep focus time by 20% next month.”
- Pick a Micro-Practice (The How) To systematically isolate collective stressors while consciously reinforcing the habits that keep your colleagues energized, implement a targeted behavioral nudge.
- To Minimize Drainers: Consider using Stop, Start, Continue (from the Book) to formally kill the activities that drained the whole group.
- To Maximize Energizers: Consider using User Manual of Me (from the Book, BUT also available to generate for Registered Website Members) to document and respect individual working styles (e.g., “I prefer quiet mornings”).