Creating Passion

As a person over fifty who has suffered from undiagnosed ADHD for a large portion of his life, I've learned first hand the importance passion plays when it comes to someone's success at work. While passion doesn't guarantee success, there is an inherent momentum toward success if you're passionate about what you do. For me, this was a necessity. If I loved what I did, I was successful at it. If I didn't, then I was often unsuccessful. As such, I instinctively created passion within myself in order to be successful at work.

As my career evolved and my passions changed I noticed that this instinctual approach no longer served me. I had to dig deeper to truly understand the roots of what made me passionate and how to create passion where it may not have existed before.

When I moved from being a software developer to being an engineering manager, I was still struggling with finding that passion within myself, much less others. I mean how exactly do you get someone excited about a payment processing system? (Yeah, I know there are those of you out there who eat and sleep payments, but you're and exception, trust me).

So over the years I broke down what specifically made me feel passionate about things so that I could foster passion in those I work with. In this article, we'll explore three key components that I have found useful in fostering passion in yourself and others. These include:

1. Be customer obsessed
2. Create a clear vision
3. Inspire trust

Be customer obsessed

This term is often overused today. It's seen all over the mantra of large companies like Amazon and on the surface it seems like a good practice. After all, if your team is obsessed with customers, they're going to have good customer service. Still, perhaps its unclear as to how this can create passion.

Passion and obsession go hand in hand. We are not often obsessed with things that we aren't passionate about. By being customer obsessed, your customer's experience now becomes important to you and the members of your company. By connecting yourself and your team with REAL customers, understanding their struggles, and knowing how you can make their lives better, we all can tap into this human desire to make a positive impact on the world around us. To know that we saved someone's job, or their health, or that we might have made someone's day a bit brighter gives our job importance. We are no longer working simply to make some executive a lot of money, we are working to make people's lives better. This is the source of passion and is essential to being passionate about work. Find these connections for yourself and create these connections for your team. It all starts with realizing that you do what you do in order to make the lives of your customers somehow... better.

Create a vision

Passion comes when everyone is united in a vision, and that vision is EXCITING to them. When people work as a team for a common goal, their mutual excitement FEEDS off of one another.

To create a vision, you need to tell a story. You need to show how your project will impact your customers. Combined with customer obsession this creates passion where everyone has a stake in the game. They all care about the outcome. If you make them part of the story, they will also have a stake in how that is being accomplished. The best way to create passion in people is to give them a voice, and having a shared vision is essential to giving people that voice.

Instead of stating "what" needs to be done, communicate "what you are trying to accomplish" and allow the team to come along the trail of discovery to see what that entails. For instance, instead of saying "we want to provide a revolving line of credit to our customers", state the vision of what you are trying to accomplish in the form of a story:

Jill, the owner of Jack and Jill bicycles, is at her e-bike manufacturer to purchase five e-bikes. They tell her that she can get a 20% discount if she orders ten bikes, but she doesn't have the cash on hand. Jill would like to get to her phone and make a single click so that she can have enough money in her account to purchase the e-bikes at a discount. This allows Jill to get this discount without wasting a lot of time which would pull her away from her store. Jill uses our app because it's quick and easy to do from her phone.

By framing things in this way, we are no longer talking about a revolving credit account. Instead, we are getting our employees involved with providing value to Jill. No longer will decisions be made on implementation and UI that might be limited to a system similar to other systems. Instead this will generate new ideas as to how our company can provide value to our users and that new idea may be the very thing that differentiates us from other solutions out there. Creating something new and having a stake in the outcome is a key component to fostering passion.

If you are not a technical leader, then create this picture of the outcome for yourself. This will allow you to become passionate about what your doing and you will likely be able to provide more value to your company by understanding WHAT you are trying to accomplish rather than simply the HOW.

Inspire Trust

Passion is a fleeting thing. Think of passion like a ball in a pinball machine. You fire it and it zooms along at top speed. It hits an obstacle and it slows down. It scores some points, say off of a bumper, and it accelerates. To foster passion you need to make sure there are more things propelling it forward than slowing it down. A lack of trust is like coating the surface of the pinball machine in carpet. It halts the momentum and soon the ball just stops.

Trust is a key component and it comes from fostering a work environment that starts with trusting that your employees are trying to do the right thing. If they are customer obsessed, and they buy into the vision, this shouldn't be difficult. In fact, it is often more detrimental to put processes in place to ensure compliance for those who don't act in good faith, than it is to create an environment of trust to support those who do.

There are some philosophy's which state that trust should be earned, and while this has some merits, I have found that the most passionate workplaces START at a level of high trust. If the company, and you as a leader, make the base assumption that the employee wants to be successful and do the right thing, I find that many times employees rise to that level of trust. If, instead, to put them on a very narrow rail with which to operate, they will find a way to break the system.

Start with a base level of trust. Assume employees are out to do the right thing. With this assumption, making mistakes is okay because they are mistakes and your employee learned from them. When things go off the rails, treat them as if the problems are systemic or if you're a leader, assume there is something you could have done to make things go better, then go backward from there.

There WILL be times when you have an employee who is not operating in good faith. Handle those individually as they come up, but keep company policies in place that support your customers and your loyal and trustworthy employees. Once the level of trust erodes, it's your most passionate and talented people that sometime jump ship first.

Conclusion

By doing these three things either within yourself or trying to foster them within your team, you'll find that finding passion for what you do comes a lot easier. You'll find that work does not have to be a job. It was Confucius who said, "The man who loves his job never works a day in his life."

At least in my own life I found this to be true and passion can be fostered within a workplace just as easily as it can be stifled.