Developing Leaders Quarterly - Organizing Energy - issue 49

Developing Leaders Quarterly (DLQ) is jointly published by Ideas for Leaders (the leadership focused publisher that works with the world's premier thinkers around leadership and organizational behaviour related themes) and the Center for the Future of Organization at the Drucker School of Management.

This issue of DLQ is about energy - the kind that makes an organization vital rather than merely busy - and the leader's job of organizing it. The obvious title would have been 'Energizing Organizations', since that is the outcome every leader wants; but energy, as this issue's contributors show, is created by attending to the individuals who make up the organization, and organizing it is the activity leaders must actually master. The metaphor the issue keeps returning to is electrical: a leader's task is to reduce the resistance in the organization's power transmission, so that purpose and the willingness to collaborate can flow and become a genuine source of resilience when things go wrong.

In a wide-ranging series of articles we examine what fuels an organization and what drains it. Andrew Dyckhoff, CEO and founder of Energising Leaders, opens by asking what the point of energizing an organization really is, and Dr John Mervyn-Smith and Nathan Ott show how energized individuals - 'Game Changers' - can catalyze teams, departments and whole organizations. Rachel Neaman, the UK Department of Health's first Chief Digital Officer and now a senior international adviser, argues that in hybrid teams it is human energy, not AI efficiency, that drives performance; Dr Martina Muttke brings a cognitive-neuroscience perspective to energizing leadership; and Dr Martin Egan and John Crossan make the case that organizational energy is the new performance metric leaders can no longer afford to ignore.

In other pieces, the issue launches the DLQ Drucker Principles Series - produced with the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University - asking 'What Would Peter Do?'; Dr Kerrie O'Sullivan makes the case for leadership wisdom and AI as perfect companions; Ignazio Arces, with Rob Salafia, reframes identity adaptation as a form of leadership integrity rather than a betrayal of the 'authentic self'; and Samantha Lee sets out her 'Chronically Working' initiative and the untapped talent of employees living with long-term health conditions. The issue also carries three from the 'Ideas' series - on the cost of decision fatigue, why ignoring collaborative demands sinks agile teams and why sleep matters - alongside reviews of 'Powered By Projects', 'The Caring Company' and 'The Manager Method', and the latest business book summaries from getAbstract.

True to DLQ's strapline, 'making organizations more human', the issue's through-line is that energy is not an abstraction to be engineered but something that flows through people - and that the leader's real work is to clear the resistance in the system so that those around them can do their best.