A leading voice on relational energy, leadership communication, and flourishing organizations.
Amy Young is an organizational psychologist, professor, and a leading voice on relational energy, leadership communication, and flourishing organizations, whose work has proven to be an untapped resource for addressing workplace stress and burnout. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan, where she is now a professor at the Ross School of Business, an adjunct professor in the Department of Radiology at Michigan Medicine, and co-faculty director of its Energizing Leadership in Medicine Program. She sits on the Strategic Advisory Board of the Ross School’s Center for Positive Organizations and previously served as faculty director of the Center’s consortium.
Her research and teaching span relational energy, flourishing organizations, and leadership communication, with particular attention to how leaders can ease stress and burnout in times of disruption.
Much of her work centers on healthcare, one of the most heavily taxed professions, and has appeared in leading journals including Radiology, the American Journal of Roentgenology, and the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Her insights have positioned her as a trusted voice for organizations seeking practical, research-backed ways to restore energy and resilience in their people.
As a sought-after speaker and advisor, Amy helps leaders navigate disruption by showing up with executive presence grounded in humility, speaking with confidence and purpose, and making the people around them feel valued, seen, and capable. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband of thirty-five years and remains close to her adult sons nearby. A committed runner and cyclist, she believes sustained performance, on the road or in an organization, is built one deliberate step at a time.
Framework & Approach
Amy Young’s research offers a compelling answer: the ability to build energized, resilient teams that perform under pressure. Leaders do this through two capabilities working together — a distinctive mindset, and the communication skillset that brings it to life within their teams. In her book, Relational Energy: How to Beat Burnout and Ignite Your Team, Amy gives leaders a practical playbook for building both.
Over years of research and interviews with leaders who energize others, Amy identified two foundational orientations that consistently distinguished leaders who thrived in high-pressure, rapidly changing environments from those who burned out or became a source of depletion for their teams. These are not personality traits. They are mindsets: practiced, deliberate orientations toward the world — and they can be developed by anyone.
Mindset
Two foundational mindsets consistently distinguish leaders who thrive under pressure from those who deplete their teams. They are not personality traits — they can be developed by anyone.
Rather than focusing on how they are coming across — whether they seem capable, impressive, or in control — these leaders redirect their attention outward, toward how they can be of genuine benefit to the person in front of them. Their confidence is real because they are not preoccupied with self-presentation.
The counterintuitive finding: leaders who consistently show up for others report higher wellbeing, better health, stronger performance, and greater protection against burnout. Being of benefit to others is one of the most reliable ways to replenish a leader’s own resources.
A genuine, practiced curiosity about what they do not yet know. These leaders approach uncertainty not as a threat to their authority but as a natural feature of the work — comfortable saying, “I don’t know, let’s figure it out together.”
Because they are not defending an image, they are free to take risks, acknowledge mistakes, and change course when the evidence calls for it. That freedom is the source of the grounded optimism and quiet confidence energizing leaders carry — and it creates psychological safety for everyone around them.
The benefit mindset and the learning mindset are deeply complementary. Together they produce a leader who is simultaneously more effective and more resilient — someone whose attention is directed outward rather than inward, whose sense of security comes not from being seen as impressive but from being genuinely useful, and whose response to pressure and uncertainty is curiosity and connection rather than defensiveness and control.
These are also, not coincidentally, the mindsets that make leaders the most energizing to be around. When people feel that a leader is genuinely curious about them, invested in their growth, and focused on their wellbeing rather than their own image, something shifts — both in how they experience the work and in how capable they feel of facing whatever the work demands. This is the mechanism by which a leader’s mindset translates into extraordinary team performance, deep commitment, and lasting loyalty, even under sustained pressure.
This is the heart of Amy’s relational energy framework: the most effective leaders are the ones who leave people more energized, not depleted, after every interaction. It rests on these two mindsets working together — a benefit mindset that directs attention toward being of genuine use to others, and a learning mindset that meets uncertainty with curiosity rather than control.
Skillset
The benefit and learning mindsets are not abstract philosophies. They express themselves concretely in how leaders communicate: in the specific words they choose, the questions they ask, the way they enter a room, the way they handle uncertainty in public, and the daily interactions through which they either build or erode the trust and energy of the people around them. This is the skillset half of the equation — the practical, learnable behaviors that make an other-focused, growth-oriented mindset visible and adopted by the team.
Relational energy is created in the moment of interaction, and it lives in the details of communication: word choice, framing, and what a leader chooses to say. When energizing leaders communicate, they help their team see a world where unnoticed opportunities become the birth of promising futures. They help their team recognize their own capabilities and claim their empowerment. And they help their team experience the authentic connection and camaraderie that serves as the foundation of collective resilience. This is how a leader’s mindset becomes relational energy — not in grand gestures, but in the language and framing of a team’s everyday lived experiences.
Amy’s work on executive presence is inseparable from her work on relational energy. Genuine executive presence is not a performance or a set of polished behaviors layered over an anxious interior. It is the natural outward expression of a leader whose confidence during disruption comes from knowing how to find a way forward, and from putting others first.
Most definitions treat the leader as the subject and everyone else as the object: “What must the leader project?” This perspective overlooks a fundamental truth: executive presence does not exist in a vacuum. It exists only in the eyes and hearts of the people who experience it.
When we shift the focus and make others the subject, the real question emerges. What does the other person see and feel in the leader’s presence? At what moment do they decide — consciously or instinctively — that this person can be trusted to take on the responsibilities of an executive? True executive presence, then, is something a leader earns, moment by moment, in the perception of those they lead.
Amy and her colleague Mary Hinesly spent years developing and testing the SEE, FEEL, TRUST model — a research-backed framework built on three inseparable dimensions.
The credibility and command they project.
Whether people around them feel valued, respected, and understood.
The reliability and integrity that make people willing to follow.
Because the three dimensions are inseparable, leaders seen as compelling but who fail to make people feel valued never earn the deep loyalty that marks authentic presence. This framework is now embedded in the curriculum of the Blue Circle of Power.
Amy’s approach is grounded in peer-reviewed research and tested in real organizational environments. Her own published studies, conducted within Michigan Medicine during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrated that positive leadership communication is a stronger predictor of burnout and intent to stay than compensation, workload, or flexible scheduling.
Units whose leaders participated in the program showed higher engagement, more positive workplace climate perceptions, and actual decreases in burnout — while comparable units across the country saw burnout surge. This is the proof of concept that anchors everything: the mindset and communication skillset a leader brings to everyday interactions is one of the most powerful, and most underutilized, levers for driving performance, wellbeing, and resilience.
Amy M. Young