If you want to light a lamp in your house how do you do that? Simple, flip the switch.

Before the switch can be activated, electricity had to be disseminated to your home through transmission lines and transformers that make sure the right level of energy is delivered to your lamp; and before the electricity could be disseminated to the lamp, it had to be generated in a power plant.

The Energy of Leadership follows the same course as electricity: Generation, Dissemination, and Activation.

• Leaders Generate vision
• Leaders Disseminate resources
• Leaders Activate goals
• Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric said that leaders need tremendous personal energy and the ability to energize their teams. This flow of the energy of leadership is what makes a successful team.
• Sometimes I think this doesn’t happen as often as it could because we spend too much time and money trying to set up the perfect apparatus. Invest the time needed to clarify the message but don’t waste time when you could be moving forward. Like Dennis Miller said about electric energy, “Why is electricity so expensive these days? Why does it cost so much for something I can make with a balloon and my hair?”
• Leaders Generate vision.   George Carlin once joked that, “Electricity is really just organized lightning.” Lightening is random and its power difficult to harness, but when focused into electricity it can provide power to light up a city. Leaders generate the same type of power when they focus the attention of the team on a single vision. A scattered collection of activities can now become a united effort to achieve success.
• Leaders Disseminate resources.  Like electricity that is stepped up and down so the right voltage is delivered to each user, the energy of leadership is only really useful when it is at the right place, in the right format, to the right people, who know how to use it. I heard it said that, “It doesn’t matter how many resources you have, if you don’t know how to use them, they will never be enough.” Leaders should ensure that their team has the resources needed to accomplish the vision.
• Leaders Activate goals.  Once the work is done to generate and disseminate electricity to the house, the lamp is activated by simply flipping the switch. The goals in the energy of leadership should be that simple. Layout the key activities that need to be done and watch success come to light.  As Earle Nightingale said, “People with goals succeed because they know where they are going, it’s as simple as that.”