Building Your Energy Bus - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Nurse Leaders and organizations today struggle with staff who don’t seem engaged in their work. Engagement in work requires positive energy and optimism. How do we build that? Author Jon Gordon is well known for his work The Energy Bus. In this highly regarded book, he provides 10 rules for leaders to fuel their work, their life and their team with positive energy. He makes a strong point that we all have choices in life whether to be a positive thinker or a negative thinker. Positive thinking starts with the leader.

Rule 1 – You are the Driver of Your Bus

Positivity starts with a clear vision for your life, work and relationships. If you want a good life, rewarding work and strong relationships, you need to make to the investment of your energy to ensure that it happens.

Rule 2 – Desire, Vision and Focus Move Your Bus in the Right Direction

Gordon believes that you attract what you focus on. If you are negative and believe that things won’t get better – you will be right.

Rule 3 – Fuel Your Bus with Positive Energy

Staff love positive leaders and become discouraged when there leaders are negative. Positive energy is high octane fuel for any team. The more positive you are – the more positive things become.

Rule 4 – Invite People on Your Bus and Share Your Vision for the Future

No leader can work alone. You need your team to help make things work.

Rule 5 – Don’t Waste Your Time on People Who Don’t Get on the Bus

Too often, leaders spend all their time with their most negative staff trying to get them to be more engaged. Engagement is a choice and not one you can make for anyone else.

Rule 6 – No Energy Vampires Allowed on Your Bus

You build a culture around what you tolerate. Gordon suggests that we should not tolerate negativity. For many staff, it has become a destructive habit. Call it out.

Rule 7 – Enthusiasm Attracts More Passengers and Energizes Them During the Ride

Being around happy and positive people makes people feel happy and positive. Patients can sense when there is positivity on a unit – it changes everything.

Rule 8 – Love Your Passengers

Leaders need to genuinely demonstrate that they care deeply about their staff. To love staff, you need to make time for them, listen to them, recognize them, serve them and bring out the very best in them.

Rule 9 – Drive with Purpose

Staff get inspired when they see the purpose in their work and leaders constantly make connections between what the team does and the outcomes that are achieved.

Rule 10 – Have Fun and Enjoy the Ride

Too many people believe that they will live for ever but no one does. Reflect more – find more moments of joy – take more risks – leave a legacy in the people that you serve.

Using the metaphor of a bus can inspire your leadership and your own energy level. It is important to remind both yourself and your staff that the goal of every journey is to arrive with a smile on our face and a stronger team that we developed along the way.

Read to Lead

Gordon, J. (2007). The Energy Bus. New Jersey: Wiley and Sons.