March is the month that reveals what’s really going on with your leadership this year.
The adrenaline of the new year has worn off. First quarter results are coming due, and your first quarterly business review is approaching fast. If bonuses are a thing in your company, they have likely just paid out and some of your best people are quietly weighing whether this is still where they want to be. The winter slog is dragging on while the pressure to deliver just keeps getting louder. And, oh by the way, Daylight Saving Time is about to knock everyone’s internal clock sideways.
Welcome to the real March Madness.
Here’s what I’ve learned in 25 years of coaching executives: the leaders who navigate March successfully aren’t the ones who grind the hardest. They’re the ones who manage their energy – personal, team, and organizational – intentionally so that they can lead for both results and relationships.
Energy, not time, is the true scarce commodity of leadership. You can’t manage time; everybody gets 168 hours a week. But you can manage the energy you bring to the time you have.
Let me share what you can do to increase and focus energy in three domains – personal, team, and organizational.
Personal Energy
Olympic gold medalist and championship coach Dain Blanton shared something about energy management on my Best Ever podcast that really stuck with me: “You don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your training.”
A lot of leaders believe that when the big moment comes – the QBR, the board meeting, the crucial retention conversation – they’ll rise to meet it. Sometimes they do. More often, they fall to whatever level their daily habits have prepared them for. If your preparation has been consistent, you get good outcomes. If it’s been sporadic under the weight of the opening months of 2026, March Madness will expose that.
So, the question isn’t if your energy and focus can rise to the occasion. The question is how can you raise the level of your training?
Here are some key practices that Coach Blanton uses with his championship players that can help you perform when the pressure is on:
Visualize the Win – take five minutes each morning to visualize what winning looks like today – not what’s on your to-do list, but how you need to show up to get the win.
Eat the Frog Early – get the hardest thing on your schedule done first when your energy is highest.
Next Play Mindset – when something goes sideways, focus on what’s next rather than replaying the last play.
Take a Stop-Down – keep the vibe of the last conversation from affecting the next by stopping and slowing down with 30 seconds of deep breathing to create an intentional transition.
All of these are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference. Which one would make the biggest difference for you this month?
Team Energy
Managing your own energy is necessary but not sufficient. Right now, the energy and focus of some of your best people may be dipping. Maybe they’ve been running so hard since the beginning of the year that they’re starting to feel burned out or, perhaps, lost in the shuffle. Or it could be that a bonus has hit their bank account. They could either be feeling appreciated, or they could be thinking, “I’ve got the cash, maybe I should take a fresh look at other options.”
So, what can you do to keep your team feeling focused, appreciated, and energetic during March Madness? I’d suggest you put three Ps into practice – protect, push, and promote. When you:
Protect Your Team, you pace the work, provide air cover from distractions, and back your people up when things go sideways.
Push Your Team, you keep goals front and center, work on expanding capabilities, and show your people how they’re growing.
Promote Your Team, you speak for their work, build a narrative that threads individual accomplishments into a bigger story, and create opportunities for your people to shine.
Protect. Push. Promote. Which of the three needs more attention from you in March?
Organizational Energy
Personal energy keeps you sharp. Team energy keeps your people engaged. Organizational energy makes possible the cross-functional effort that pulls in the same direction instead of siloed efforts working at cross purposes.
The latter is what often starts happening during March Madness. As the pressure builds, leaders start over indexing on their functional responsibilities. Cross-functional collaboration slows down because everyone’s focusing on their own plans. The kumbaya of the beginning of the year kick-offs fade, and functional leaders and their teams go heads down on their plans. Silos harden.
A wise executive named Lucien Alziari shared something with me years ago that I’ve never forgotten: the most successful senior executives approach their work with a business first, function second mindset. That’s the essence of what’s called being on the first team. If you’re a designated leader, your first team isn’t the function you lead. It’s the leadership team you sit on.
First team leaders do a few things that are especially important during high-pressure stretches like March Madness. They start with the question, “What are we trying to accomplish as a business?” and reverse engineer back from there. They bust silos by reaching out to colleagues across the organization to solve problems that don’t fit neatly in any one function’s lane. They share resources – talent, ideas, budget – in service of the bigger game rather than hoarding them for their own scoreboard. And they have each other’s backs when things get hard.
The organizational energy question during March Madness is this: Are you showing up for your first team, or are you burrowing into your function?
The Real March Madness
So, the real March Madness isn’t about the brackets. It’s about the temptation to deplete yourself, your team, and your organization in pursuit of what’s right in front of you instead of taking a step back to invest in the disciplines, relationships, and clarity that create success that lasts.
Before you move on to your next thing, take a few moments to consider this last question, for each of the three buckets of energy – personal, team, and organizational, what’s one step you want to take this week to start making the shift from March Madness to March Mastery?
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