What begins with one person rarely stays with them because there is an invisible, but clearly felt chain. Here’s what I mean.
Every business runs a supply chain that we already know how to track: the movement of materials, money, information and work, monitored from the moment something arrives until the moment it reaches the client.
Yet there is a second supply chain running through every business, one that carries no physical stock, rarely appears in an audit and never shows up as a line in the accounts, and which nevertheless shapes every decision, conversation, relationship and result that follows from it.
It is the energy and emotion supply chain.
When I talk about energy in a business context, I am talking about something you already recognise instinctively, long before you have language for it.
You know the difference between a meeting that leaves everyone clearer and one that drains the life from the room, just as you know the person whose presence steadies others and the person whose tension somehow arrives in the room before they do, and you know, too, when an email is carrying urgency that the words themselves, however polite, cannot quite disguise.
You feel it, but perhaps haven’t got the words to clearly articulate it, except for… “you know what I mean don’t you?”
Energy, in this sense, is the quality of human capacity moving through your business. It can be found in attention, pace, presence, possibility and emotion is simply part of the information that capacity carries with it.
Neither energy nor emotion stays neatly contained inside one person. It leaks and drains or effervesces and bubbles over with positive joy. And, remember “emotion” is energy in motion!
What Begins Upstream Travels Downstream
Think of it the way you would think of a river. What enters a watercourse at its source, whether that is a fallen branch, a mineral, or a pollutant carried in from a field, does not stay at the source. It travels the whole length of the river, shaping the water quality, the wildlife and the ground it passes through long before it reaches the sea. A business carries its energy the same way. What an owner brings into a Monday morning meeting is rarely contained to that time or place. It travels the full length of the organisation, and it arrives, eventually, at the client and with your suppliers.
Imagine an owner walking into a Monday meeting already braced for another difficult week, speaking quickly, changing three priorities within the first ten minutes, asking why something has still not been done and finishing, almost as an afterthought, with, “Can someone just sort this?”
The leadership team receives far more than the words themselves; they receive the urgency, the frustration and the unspoken fear running beneath them, and a manager, absorbing that pressure without quite naming it, passes it on to the team, who rush, grow cautious, or stop asking the useful questions that might have caught the problem earlier. Someone makes an avoidable mistake. Work is repeated unnecessarily. A client, several steps removed from the original meeting, senses a defensiveness they cannot quite explain. By Friday, one person’s unprocessed pressure has become a cost that the whole business is quietly paying.
The reverse is also true.
A grounded leader can say, “This matters. Here is what we know. Here is what we do not yet know. This is the decision and this is who owns the next step.”
The situation may be exactly as serious as before, yet what now travels through the business is clarity rather than alarm: managers are free to lead, people are free to think, problems surface earlier than they otherwise would, and the client, at the very end of the chain, experiences confidence rather than defensiveness.
Every leader feels pressure; what determines its effect on the business is whether that pressure reaches people processed, as leadership, or unprocessed, as alarm.
Why This Is a Commercial Issue
I don’t often refer to research, but today I feel it is useful to show that what we, as humans, have known for millenia, is now being named by scientific research.
Research into emotional contagion demonstrates that moods transfer within groups, shaping cooperation, conflict and perceived performance in ways that participants rarely trace back to their true source, while research into what has been termed “relational energy” found that the energy people experienced in their interactions with leaders predicted their later engagement, and, through that engagement, their job performance. More recent work continues to demonstrate that a leader’s emotional expression shapes how respected and valued their people feel, with measurable consequences for performance that follow.
In other words, what you bring into a room does not remain yours; it becomes part of the operating environment itself.
An owner’s state can certainly be the source of that pressure, though just as often it is simply the signal, the first visible symptom of a problem sitting elsewhere in the business entirely.
An unreliable process, a dominant client, a decision nobody in the business will make, an underperforming manager, poor visibility of cash, or a business still entirely dependent upon its founder can all create a genuine and entirely rational human response, and while that pressure is real, asking people to cope with it more skilfully does nothing to remove whatever is causing it in the first place.
This is why I describe workplace stress as a human symptom of an operational problem far more often than a human problem in its own right.
A breathing practice can create genuine space to see clearly and act wisely, and that matters more than people often credit; wellbeing support earns its place in a business only when it sits alongside the harder work of resolving what is actually causing the strain, rather than being asked to help people tolerate it indefinitely.
Stress should be dismantled, not merely managed
This distinction matters most acutely in businesses that already care deeply about sustainability, where the irony can run deepest.
Purpose can create a pressure entirely its own, because when the mission genuinely matters, people give more, carry more and tolerate more than they otherwise would, and doing good can quietly become the very reason nobody feels able to admit that they are depleted.
Sustainability, properly understood, concerns what we ask of people just as much as what we ask of the planet.
A company can reduce its waste, measure its carbon, improve biodiversity across its supply chain and still consume human energy at a rate no ecosystem would tolerate, holding excellent environmental credentials in one hand while urgency, guilt, frustration and exhaustion move entirely unchecked through its culture in the other.
Human Depletion Is a Hidden Emission
Hidden Emissions is one of my proprietary systems where I analyse levels of human depletion that are expressed as one of business’s Hidden Emissions, and like any emission left unmeasured, it leaves a footprint all the same, visible in absence, presenteeism, mistakes, rework, indecision, lost ideas, strained relationships, client churn and, in time, profit and value.
Audit What Your Business Is Passing On
Here are eight questions to get your mind thinking about how you can audit the energy in your business:
1 If you were to map your energy and emotion supply chain, what would you find?
2 What do people repeatedly have to absorb in order to keep the business moving?
3 Where does energy rise, and where does it disappear?
4 Which emotion travels fastest through the organisation?
5 What is the business requiring people to pretend they do not feel?
6 Which operational problem is creating the greatest emotional wake?
7 What reaches the client at the end of the chain?
8 Does the business create capacity in its people, or continuously consume it?
Resist settling for “people are stressed” as a diagnosis; treat stress instead as information, and follow it upstream to its source.
Find the meeting that creates the confusion; the decision that keeps returning to the owner’s desk; the client everybody quietly dreads; the promise sales keeps making that operations cannot fulfil; the silence around the one thing everybody already knows and nobody yet names.
That is where The Source Solution™ often begins.
What Is Your Business Producing?
Every business produces more than a product, a service or a profit line; it produces, whether it intends to or not, a daily human experience.
That experience travels outward through leaders, teams, clients, suppliers, families and communities, shaping the quality of every decision made, the use of every resource spent and the amount of genuine good the business is able to create in the world.
Your energy and emotion supply chain already exists, whether or not you have ever named it, and the only real choice available to you is whether you leave it unmanaged or begin, deliberately, to design it.
Start with you, yes. But do not stop with you.
Find the source. Restore the flow.
When a business finally stops passing its pressure downstream, the water runs clearer for everyone standing in it: decisions sharpen, relationships strengthen, waste falls away, profit follows, and the people who built the business discover a rare and settled peace in place of the exhaustion they had quietly accepted as the price of purpose.
A business capable of thriving without consuming the people who love it most is not an accident. It is what happens when the business, rather than its owner, is finally asked to do the harder work.
Research Referenced
Sigal G. Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior,” Administrative Science Quarterly (2002).
Bradley P. Owens, Wayne E. Baker, Dana McDaniel Sumpter and Kim S. Cameron, “Relational Energy at Work: Implications for Job Engagement and Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology (2016).
Jacob S. Levitt, Constantinos G. V. Coutifaris, Paul I. Green Jr. and Sigal G. Barsade, “Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance,” Organization Science (published online 2024).
If any of this is landing deep within your soul and quickly kicked over to your bank balance, rather than merely resonating, and you would like to talk it through properly, I offer a virtual coffee. No script, no sales pitch, just a proper conversation about what is happening in your business, and in you.
Get in touch and let’s have a confidential conversation that costs nothing, but might change everything. 30 minutes for a virtual coffee.
Love. Gail.