The Art and Science of Competitive Energy

First published on LinkedIn in July 2022. Revised and expanded in July 2026 to reflect the findings of The Science of Ambition™.

In the summer of 2022 I wrote a short piece calling myself an energy zealot. I had no research behind me. I had three decades on teams: some where the energy carried us further than our plans deserved, and others where I could feel the life being drained out of me, bit by bit, every single day. I knew energy was a competitive weapon. I could not yet prove it.

Now I can. Energy is one of the three dimensions of The Ambition Model™, alongside Conviction and Audacity, tested against the lives of more than 200 people who demonstrated extraordinary ambition. The instinct has a scorecard. What follows is the original argument, rebuilt with what the research has since confirmed.

Start with the claim I made then, because it still holds. Great teams have something that not-so-great teams do not have, and you know it when you have it, and even more when you do not. Talent is attracted to energy. Prospects are attracted to energy. Competitors will try to copy you and will mostly fail, because energy is the one advantage that does not survive imitation. That is why I called it competitive energy.

Why does nobody talk about energy?

Because it is hard to describe, and what is hard to describe goes unmanaged. Medicine gave pain a scale of one to ten. Energy never received an equivalent. Nick Paumgarten, writing in The New Yorker, described energy as "biochemical and psychophysical, vaguely delineated, widely misunderstood, elusive as grace." That is a fine description and a useless management tool.

So leaders sort themselves into two camps. Some make energy their first priority and work hard to understand it and build it, because they know what it is worth. Others find the whole subject uncomfortably close to the esoteric and retreat to the rational, kanban-driven, metrics-fuelled world where everything has a number. The second camp is larger. It is also leaving its most defensible advantage unattended.

Can you actually measure energy?

Yes, once you stop treating energy as a feeling and start treating it as a set of observable behaviours. In building The Science of Ambition™, I scored more than 200 remarkable individuals against The Ambition Model™. Energy is one of its three dimensions, and it shows up in three ways you can see from across a room: a captivating story, where people want to join rather than need convincing; decisive action, the hard calls that clear the way for others to perform; and confident momentum, progress visible enough that each success makes the next more likely.

Two findings from the research deserve to be stated plainly. Of the entire sample, only five people earned a perfect Energy score: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Greta Thunberg, and Pelé. And the women in the sample scored measurably higher on Energy than the men, often because they built more contagious movements to overcome the structural barriers in front of them. Nothing in any of that is touchy-feely. Every component is observable, and what is observable can be built.

What I have learned about energy

Energy starts with you. It is your vitality, your vigour, your appetite for the thing you are doing, and if you lead a team without it, your team will not have it either. I have run teams where the energy was terrific, and others where I know I contributed to the drain. The difference always traced back to the person at the front of the room.

Energy is contagious, to a point. The organisational scholar Sigal Barsade spent her career proving what most of us feel in our bones: she called it the ripple effect, and her studies found that positive emotional contagion in groups improved cooperation, reduced conflict, and lifted how members judged their own performance, while negative contagion did the opposite. Surrounding yourself with people who are as eager as you are produces a remarkably different result from surrounding yourself with the petulant and the ornery. Eeyores are contagious too, which is why the colleague who drains a room costs far more than his output ever repays.

Ambition fuels energy for a long time. When you are working toward something you genuinely want to achieve, the ambition itself propels you forward. When you are working someone else's agenda, or no agenda at all, you have entered the territory of destructive energy, and no amount of discipline will hold you there indefinitely.

You can discern the patterns. Identify what gives you energy and do more of it, and stop doing what drains you where you can. Some draining tasks will remain, and the move there is to reframe them until they connect to something that does give you energy. A 4:30am alarm is nobody's idea of pleasure, but walking out of the gym at six, set up for the day, makes the alarm a small price.

Part of energy is biology. Dr Mark Hyman calls it FLC syndrome, short for Feel Like Crap: the compound cost of what we eat, how little we move, and whether we get enough REM sleep. Paumgarten's piece spent its science on the mitochondria that fuel every cell in the body. The lesson from both is the same, and it is a hopeful one. Some portion of your energy is physiological, and physiology responds to decisions you are free to make today.

And one warning. This has nothing to do with introversion or extroversion. Some of the greatest energy I have ever encountered came from people who would be labelled introverts. Volume is a personality trait; energy is a force.

When you are the whole firm

Everything above applies double to the reader who works alone. If you are an independent consultant or advisor, your energy is the business. Clients buy it whether they name it or not, and they can tell within a meeting whether you are running on conviction or on fumes. The pattern-reading lesson becomes an act of business design: the work that gives you energy is almost always the work where you are sharpest, and a practice built around that work compounds, while a practice built on whatever the market hands you drains its owner one custom engagement at a time.

You can change your energy

That is the line from 2022 I would defend above all the others, and it is the reason the research matters. If energy were fixed, a personality accident, there would be nothing to manage and nothing to build. It is neither. It is observable, it is contagious, it is partly biological, and it responds to deliberate choices about story, action, and momentum. Which leaves the question I asked four years ago, and the only place to start: what do you want your energy to be?

If you want to see how Energy sits inside the full research, alongside Conviction and Audacity, the work lives at The Science of Ambition™.

Frequently asked questions

What is competitive energy?

Competitive energy is the vitality and momentum of a team that attracts talent, draws clients, and cannot be copied by competitors. It functions as a durable business advantage because it is built from within.

Can you measure a team's energy?

Yes, through observable behaviours. The Ambition Model™ assesses Energy through three components: whether people are drawn to join, whether hard decisions get made visibly, and whether progress compounds from one success to the next.

Is high energy just an extrovert trait?

No. Energy and extroversion are unrelated. Some of the most energising leaders are introverts; the force comes from conviction and momentum, and it has nothing to do with volume.

Is energy the same as engagement or morale?

No. Engagement and morale describe how people feel about their work. Energy describes the activating force a team projects, which pulls in talent, clients, and momentum from outside it.