You’re not lazy - you’re just misaligned.

Stop managing time. Start managing energy 

Most people think burnout comes from working too much.

This episode challenges that.

It’s not always about volume - it’s about alignment.

In this episode of The Way I See It, I break down why performance issues are often misdiagnosed as laziness, lack of discipline, or poor work ethic — when in reality, they’re caused by people working against how they’re naturally wired.

Using a simple framework of four energy types, Initiator, Sustainer, Advisor, and Reflector, this episode explores how different people generate and deploy energy, and why most organisations completely ignore this when designing roles.

What we cover:

•  Why “working harder” doesn’t always improve performance 
•  The difference between managing time vs managing energy 
•  How misalignment leads to burnout, disengagement, and underperformance 
•  Why many “bad hires” are actually deployment issues 
•  How leadership and team design often reward the wrong behaviours 

Key takeaway:

Most performance problems aren’t capability issues.

They’re alignment issues.

When you understand how people actually operate, and deploy them accordingly, performance becomes easier, not forced.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the way I see it. Short thoughts on work, life, and the decisions in between and why we tend to overcomplicate all three. Straight from the front line of modern business, grab a coffee, grab a pad, and let's get into it. So episode two, you're not lazy, you're just misaligned. Stop managing time, start managing energy. So I'm going to say something that a few years ago I probably would have completely written off, like really dismissed it. Potentially put in the same category as people telling you that the universe is in charge of your calendar or your morning routine can fix everything for the day. So just take it with that context and stick with me because I was sceptical initially and still am to a degree, but I constantly see this to be successful, and I think most businesses fundamentally misunderstand how people are designed to work, and I don't mean personality, skill, IQ, I mean how they actually generate and deploy energy. So there's a modality called human design. Some people see it as spiritual. I looked at it and thought it there's parts that are a bit out there, but when you strip the language back, it's actually just describing patterns of how people operate under pressure and over time. So in business terms, I'd translate it to this. You have four energy types initiator, a sustainer, an advisor, and a reflector. And now it sounds less like a retreat in barley and more like an operating model. So within the framework, I'd personally fall into what they would call a manifester, so in the business term, an initiator. So when I looked at it properly, I realized something quite uncomfortable. It actually describes me very accurately. I thrive in high-pressured situations, meetings, sharpen negotiation. I enjoy setting direction and I like starting things, but sitting at a desk for eight, nine hours doing steady execution work that drains me. And for years I thought that meant that maybe I like discipline or desire, ambition, but it didn't, it just meant I was structuring my day against how I'm actually wired. So I suppose a real life example, a couple of weekends ago, I flew across um Europe for day of meetings basically, back to back, high intensity, kind of high-pressured meetings. And I already knew that the next few days aren't going to look the same. My energy will drop, I'll need to reset, I'll need to kind of refocus and then ultimately go again. But now I'm aware that it's not inconsistency, it's just my energy cycle. And because I'm more in tune with this and more aligned to it, I can kind of plan my days more productively and more accordingly. And most organizations actually design roles around time spent, not time, sorry, time spent not energy deployed. And I feel like that's a flaw because not everyone's built for the same output pattern. And if you're a leader listening to this, there's a slightly uncomfortable question here. Are you building roles around what the business actually needs or what you're actually comfortable managing because it's not the same thing? So think of it like this: the initiator starts things, creates direction, drives momentum. The sustainer delivers consistent output, keeps things moving. The advisor sees what's broken, improves systems and refines decisions, and the reflector will read the environment, understand the culture, and spot misalignment early. So just to be clear, none of these are actually kind of one's better than the other. But the problem is that most businesses reward one type, and that's consistency, visibility, and almost time spent at your desk. So people start performing against their natural design to fit a system. Now here's where businesses tend to get it wrong. If you force an initiator into constant into constant execution, ultimately you get burnout. If you expect a sustainer to constantly create from nothing, you get frustration. And if you ignore an advisor, you miss optimization. If you put a reflector in the wrong environment, they'll ultimately shut down. So when that happens, performance doesn't drop immediately, but it will degrade quietly. And you've got compliance instead of contribution, you have activity instead of impact, and you eventually get disengagement. But when you understand how someone generates energy, you stop asking, are they working hard enough? and start asking, are they deployed correctly? And if you're leading a team, this is ultimately where it gets real. It's not enough to hire well, you're also accountable for the people you hire and how you deploy them after they join. And most mishires aren't actually bad hires, they're just misinlight environments. And again, it's it's something that I see kind of constantly in hiring. A business brings in a senior lead, someone hired to challenge, thinking, reshape direction, bring a different lens. Within three months, they're pulled into reporting cycles, internal alignment meetings, stakeholder management, essentially execution. And then six months in the conversation becomes they're not quite what we expected. But the reality is you didn't hire wrong, you deployed wrong. You hired an initiator and then turned them into a sustainer. The flip side is where it becomes useful. The best leaders I've seen don't try to force everyone into the same rhythm. They recognise that different people create value in different ways. Some are brilliant at starting things, some are brilliant at building stability, some are brilliant at spotting what isn't working, some are brilliant reading the environment before everyone else catches up. And the point isn't to make everyone operate the same, it's to know what kind of contribution you actually need and then position people accordingly. That's when teams become the most effective or more effective, and not because everyone's suddenly working harder or putting in more hours, it's because people are finally working in a way that helps them perform the best. Alternatively, if you're on the other side of it as an employee, you also need to understand firstly how you operate. Because if you don't, you'll keep putting yourself in environments that reward the wrong things for you, and then you begin to question your own ability when actually again it's just misalignment, not capability. I've definitely I've definitely felt this personally at times in my career as well, where there were periods where the answer was just to be, you know, be more disciplined, lock in, sit down for longer, push harder, stay at your desk for more hours. It's um it's just be more consistent in the traditional sense. But the more I did it, the worse I actually performed. Not because again, not because I was lazy, not because I lacked ambition, but because I was trying to force myself into a mode of working that drains me faster than it gives me anything back. And once again, I when I understood this and I stopped to look at it, I stopped judging myself the wrong way, and I started planning around my actual energy instead of trying to imitate someone else's operating style, or trying to imitate someone else's way of thinking. Because businesses spend huge amounts of money trying to improve performance, better hiring, better onboarding, better assessments, better engagement strategies, but a lot of the effort still ignores the basic question or the fundamentals. Is this person actually being used in the way that they perform the best? Because if the answer is no, then even the very capable people become expensive underperformers, and it's not because of a lack of ability, it's just the system around them is misreading how they actually create value, and it's not again, it might sound like it a little bit, but it's not philosophy, it's just economics. Misalign people cost money in lost output, in slow decisions, in unnecessary turnover, and most of it's completely avoidable. And I think this is where leadership gets exposed a little bit, because a lot of managers don't actually manage for output, they manage for familiarity, they trust people who work in ways that they personally recognize. So if they're a process driven, they value visibility, structure, consistency. If they're highly creative and instinctive, they often undervalue people who need steadier conditions to perform. But leadership isn't about managing people who feel familiar to yourself, it's about understanding what each person needs in order to produce their best work, and it's just a completely different skill set. So if there is one thing you take away from this, it's don't try to manage people purely by time, try to understand them by energy because time is easy to measure, but energy is where performance actually lives, and when businesses get that wrong, you don't just lose productivity, you waste capability that you've already paid for and you've already invested in. But once you started noticing this, you literally see it everywhere in teams, leadership, hiring decisions, in the burnout, in people who look fine on paper but never click in the role, and more often than not, again, it's not capability, it's just alignment. I get that part of this still sounds a little bit maybe out there, but if it improves how you think about people, it's probably worth paying attention to. That's the way I see it. And once you see this one, you see it everywhere. If it resonates, share it with someone who wants to hear it.