How CEOs can energise teams through gratitude, presence, and praise

Executive overview

Most leaders drain energy without realising it — by leading with criticism, delivering feedback poorly, or neglecting to acknowledge what's going well. The antidote is intentional energy management: showing up with the right state, praising twice as often as you assign new work, and building systems that keep gratitude flowing at scale.

The CEO's most important job is to be the Chief Energising Officer — and that requires deliberate, daily practice.

Praise and the love-bomb principle

• Employees who only hear what's wrong conclude they can never please you.
• The ratio: praise twice for every new project or piece of criticism you deliver.
• Howard Behar (Starbucks, 14,000 locations) spent two hours every Friday handwriting thank-you notes — pre-addressed by his EA with store records and milestones to reference.
• Video messages from your phone close the gap when face-to-face contact is weeks away.
• Retargeting gratitude in meditation: force yourself to name two team members you're grateful for daily, then tell them.

Managing your own energy before theirs

• The "sidewalk rule": prepare your state before walking in the room, not after.
• Badly delivered feedback (e.g. attacking clapping costs) can drain a 140-person company for a week.
• Prime yourself with gratitude before any team address — your body language and facial expressions transmit before you speak.
• A pre-meeting gratefulness exercise with leadership can cascade energy improvements down the whole organisation.

Approachability and psychological safety

• Address the "pink elephant" directly: humanise yourself by naming what might intimidate (tattoos, height, title) and laughing about it.
• Share what you're working on improving — it makes it safe for others to admit they're working on something too.
• Leaders speak last: ask questions, then shut up. Don't validate or challenge ideas in the moment.
• "What's one thing you want to tell me that you don't think I want to hear?" — a Zappos head-of-culture technique.
• Drop titles; being "Fred" instead of "Dr. Jones" collapses status distance overnight.

Structured connection at scale

• MBWA (Management by Walking Around): two 30-minute calendar blocks per week, different routes each time.
• Skip-level lunches: five people, every Wednesday, 18 months — mix by department, tenure, gender.
• When visiting remote locations, pre-identify three to five emerging leaders and take them to lunch — let each invite someone.
• For leadership teams in silos: require each member to publicly thank someone in a different business area at every meeting. Blue Grace Logistics ran this for 52 weeks with dramatic results.

Team identity and cross-functional cohesion

• The left tackle's most important team is the Steelers, not the offensive line. Every business area lead's most important team is the whole company, not their department.
• When that mindset takes hold, real growth starts.

Inspect what you expect

• Commission errors ran undetected for three years because no system existed to review reports.
• At 1-800-GOT-JUNK, four QA staff monitored 86 call-centre metrics; the five that mattered weren't improving. Cutting to five metrics transformed results within three weeks.
• Bob-proofing: design systems so the weakest person in the worst market can still execute at the standard of the best.
• Fractional CFOs are a cost-effective oversight layer at the $40–80M revenue stage.

Building a permission-free culture

• When employees ask what to do, respond: "What do you think we should do?" — then send them away to decide.
• Your job is to grow confidence and decision-making ability, not to supply answers.
• Use a results-vs-core-values four-box matrix (reviewed by the whole leadership team) to surface performance conversations that a manager avoids alone.

Firing and leadership accountability

• Reluctance to fire usually stems from inexperience — it eases with repetition, never becomes fun.
• Peer challenge in leadership reviews forces honest ratings; managers need to hear "he's a four, not a seven" from peers, not just from above.
• When someone leaves badly, don't blame them. Ask what you missed in hiring, onboarding, training, or inspection.