Charging a Dead Battery

Picture a cold winter morning in the Midwest. You bundle up, head out to the car, turn the key, and hear the sound no one wants to hear: click, click, click. A dead battery. We didn't prepare for it in the warmer months, and now we're paying for it in the cold. The same thing happens every day inside our organizations — and most leaders don't even realize they're the ones who've been leaving the lights on.

A 65% Disengagement Rate Is Not a Statistic. It's a Crisis.

Gallup's research on workplace engagement consistently delivers a number that should stop every leader cold: roughly 65% of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work (Harter, 2020). That means two out of every three people on your team are showing up without full investment. Some are coasting. Some are quietly undermining. And almost all of them got there one drained conversation at a time.

Disengagement is not a hiring problem or a compensation problem. It is a relationship problem. And like a dead car battery, it almost never happens overnight. It builds up over weeks and months of small negative charges: the conversation that felt dismissive, the feedback that landed as criticism rather than coaching, the moment a leader chose efficiency over empathy. By the time you hear the click, click, click, the damage has accumulated for a long time.

The good news is the same thing that's true about jump-starting a car is true about re-energizing a relationship: it's not complicated, as long as you're prepared.

The Jump-Start Framework: Lessons from the Driveway

The Meineke resource center describes jump-starting a battery as a straightforward process — if you have the right cables and know the right sequence. I typed out the steps one morning, and the words almost jumped off the page at me. Every step maps to something real in the way we show up for our people.

Here's the technical sequence, followed by what it means in a coaching conversation:

1. Park the vehicles next to each other. Get close to your people. Presence is the prerequisite for connection.
2. Both vehicles should be off. Set the parking brakes. Pause before the conversation. A leader in reactive mode charges nothing.
3. Attach the red clamp to the positive terminal on the dead battery. Start with the other person's strengths and intent. Lead with what's working.
4. Attach the red clamp to the positive terminal on the working battery. Bring your own positive energy. You are part of the circuit.
5. Attach the black clamp to the negative terminal on the working battery. Introduce the challenge — but from a position of stability, not threat.
6. Attach the black cable to a clean surface on the engine block. Ground the hard conversation. Keep it specific, factual, and free of charge.
7. Start the working vehicle and let it run. Give before you take. Establish trust before introducing difficulty.
8. Start the dead vehicle. It should turn on. If you've done the work, the relationship should respond.
9. If it doesn't turn on, try revving the engine. If the relationship doesn't immediately improve, keep at it. Persistence matters.
10. Disconnect the black cables first, then the red ones. Close the conversation cleanly. Gain commitment on next steps before you disconnect.

What's striking about this sequence is the precision. You don't connect the cables in any order you feel like. You don't skip steps because you're in a hurry. The sequence matters — and so does the dosage.

The Neurochemistry Behind the Charge

Here is where it gets interesting: you have the biological capacity to jump-start another person's battery. Not metaphorically. Neurochemically.

My mentor Dr. Richard Boyatzis and his colleagues have spent decades researching what happens in the brain when people experience different kinds of relational interactions. Their work on Positive Emotional Attractors (PEA) and Negative Emotional Attractors (NEA) gives us a framework for understanding why some conversations energize people while others drain them (Boyatzis, Smith, & Van Oosten, 2019).

Think of PEA and NEA as your red and black cables. Both are necessary. Neither is inherently wrong. The problem is most leaders reach for the wrong one first, or apply too much of one without enough of the other.

The Red Cable: Positive Emotional Attractors

The Positive Emotional Attractor activates what Boyatzis describes as the parasympathetic nervous system — the system responsible for rest, recovery, and openness. When someone is in the PEA state, their brain releases hormones like oxytocin, which produce feelings of trust, hope, and connection. Cognitively, the person becomes more open to new ideas, more willing to reflect, and more capable of sustained change.

In a leadership conversation, PEA activation looks like this: a leader who starts by asking about the person's vision for their own growth. A manager who opens a feedback session by acknowledging what the team member has done well and why it matters. A coach who creates the conditions for someone to feel heard before introducing a challenge.

This is not softness. This is strategy. You cannot drive meaningful behavior change in a person whose brain is in threat mode. The red cable has to go on first.

The Black Cable: Negative Emotional Attractors

The Negative Emotional Attractor activates the sympathetic nervous system — the system that governs the stress response. When someone is in the NEA state, hormones like cortisol help them fight, flee, or prepare for threat. The NEA is not inherently destructive; it sharpens focus, clarifies priorities, and can be exactly what someone needs to recognize the stakes of a situation.

The problem is that leaders often lead with the black cable. They open with the problem, the gap, the underperformance — and then wonder why the conversation never gains traction. A brain that has been put into threat mode does not easily shift into openness. The stress response narrows cognition. The person becomes defensive, disengaged, or compliant in the moment but unchanged in behavior.

Feedback delivered in the wrong sequence does not charge the battery. It drains it further.

Getting the Balance Right

Research supports a specific ratio for sustained behavioral change: a person needs to experience PEA at two to five times the frequency or duration of NEA (Boyatzis, Rochford, & Taylor, 2015). That's not a soft guideline. It's a neurological requirement for meaningful, lasting development.

Most managers have this ratio inverted. Feedback sessions are front-loaded with problems. Performance reviews are weighted toward what went wrong. Team meetings open with what's behind schedule. The brain keeps a running ledger, and over time the deficit accumulates. The battery drains. The employee disengages.

Getting the balance right does not mean avoiding hard conversations. It means sequencing them correctly. It means building enough positive charge in the relationship that the person has the psychological resources to receive and act on the difficult feedback. It means recognizing that the most effective leaders are not the ones who tell people what's wrong. They are the ones who create the conditions in which people can change.

When a Battery Cannot Be Revived

There is one more thing worth naming. Sometimes a car battery has been dead so long, or corroded so severely, that no amount of jump-starting will bring it back. The acid has leaked. The terminals are destroyed. The honest thing to do is replace it.

The same is occasionally true in professional relationships. A leader who has consistently led with the black cable — who has made someone feel small, unseen, or unsafe over an extended period of time — may reach a point where the relationship cannot be recovered through better coaching conversations alone. And sometimes the individual themselves has chosen a level of disengagement that no investment will reverse.

Don't fear that reality. Acknowledge it clearly, make the appropriate decision with care and respect, and direct your energy toward the relationships where the charge can still take hold. A coaching culture is not built by pouring unlimited energy into dead batteries. It's built by developing the judgment to know the difference.

Every Conversation Is a Charge or a Drain

Disengagement is not inevitable. It is the cumulative result of interactions that, one by one, left people with less energy than they came in with. The inverse is also true: engagement is the cumulative result of interactions that left people with more. Every conversation you have as a leader is either adding charge or taking it away.

Like jump-starting a battery, the steps are not complicated. But they require preparation. They require knowing which cable to connect first. And they require the discipline to follow the sequence even when you're in a hurry, even when the feedback is hard, even when it would be easier to just floor it and hope the other person figures it out.

As the winter gets cold, don't let your relationships do the same. The cables are in the trunk. You just have to use them.

If you're thinking about what it would look like to build a coaching culture in your organization, start a conversation with the Braintrust team. This is exactly the work we do.