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Passion Policy: Train Yourself to Achieve Winning Results
May 19, 2008
Competence and the potential to grow is essential when considering a new hire. But so is employee passion. Tapping into that passion is as easy as learning how to liberate it.
By Omar Khan
Companies seek passionate people. Why? Because passion is the "something extra" so often sought and needed. Passionate people deploy their expertise and talent for optimum results. When blocked, they find ways around or through the obstacle, or create innovative alternatives. Passion leads us to learn, experiment, collaborate, and stretch. Passion is the voluntary will to fully engage, and the energized commitment to make things happen.
Most companies, however, ask the wrong question. They wonder how to build passion in their people. But this is backwards! Passion is an endowment we're born with. Children are gushing with it. Parents aren't trying to stoke passion, but to focus and harness it. Passion also is natural in everything from outings with friends, to sporting events, to hobbies, and anything we're excited by.
So why aren't we excited by where we make our living? In fact, when people are hired, they usually are enthused and passionate. That's part of what gets them hired.
The truth is companies systematically kill passion. So the question is not how to build passion but how to identify and eliminate the passion killers that take natural passion and neuter it. The canopy passion killer is the lack of quality and authenticity in our relationships. Leadership is largely about our impact on each other, how we mobilize and catalyze each other—in short how effectively and productively we relate. Most corporate pathologies and breakdowns originate from truth not told, issues not raised, conversations that don't take place, problems not confronted, collaboration withheld, silos not busted, and failure to tap the collective intelligence. These all are relationship and communication breakdowns and pernicious passion killers. They kill passion because they hinder progress. Our energy goes into evasiveness and fighting each other, rather than coming together to win.
There are nine key passion liberators we can deploy as antidotes and a powerful impetus for creating winning results:
• Passion Liberator 1: By becoming conscious that we have an impact on others often different than what we intend, and by investigating where we most frequently misunderstand each other and get defensive, we can lay the groundwork for effective intimacy. We cannot successfully team with those we don't know.
• Passion Liberator 2: We have to take aim together at a visionary purpose that provides both meaning and confers competitive advantage. This has to be converted into large "must win" battles that move us towards our visionary purpose. Once everyone is aligned on what victory looks like and agrees it would be valuable (both on its own merits and for them personally) to make it happen, then passion flows.
• Passion Liberator 3: We have to focus on a larger aim that all parties want to deliver. We then have to interrogate reality and share mutual feedback supportively and non-threateningly. We have to take shared accountability and agree how to monitor progress consultatively and ongoingly. When real conversations happen, and they advance principles not personalities, passion is abundant.
• Passion Liberator 4: We have to be able to face reality fast, but always with the eyes of possibility. We also have to accept our feelings about the reality so we can utilize those feelings, rather than pretending they don't exist. We have to frame challenges in terms of what we wish to create from them. We also have to celebrate all positive progress, acknowledge those who have brought it to us. Once affirmed and anchored in that progress, we should continually look at how we raise the bar.
• Passion Liberator 5: With possibility flowing in our paradigms, approaches, and dialogues, we have to work backwards from a game-changing future. And in engaging each other, we have to define at the outset what shared results we are after. Defining a shared breakthrough and agreeing to deliver it together creates a mutual possibility-rich coaching contract with bosses, peers, direct reports, and other stakeholders.
• Passion Liberator 6: We need to claim accountability. We do this by getting others involved early, by immersing ourselves deeply in problems until real solutions are glimpsed; by rapid prototyping with key stakeholders; building growth-fostering relationships with our bosses (by understanding what they are good at and encouraging them when they get it right); with colleagues (by inviting them to let us know how we are doing so we have a basis for sharing our input too); and by being more of a "success coach" with our team than an evaluator.
• Passion Liberator 7: Adopt vitality habits that maximize energy first before maximizing time. These habits get us to experience, learn, and attempt more new things as a way of becoming more. And finally they are about ruthlessly doing what most needs doing, the critical few things that give the most ROI in terms of energy and results.
• Passion Liberator 8: Amplify potential by having interactions that allow us to fight gracefully if we must, but anchored in the type of respect that allows us to work in concert. We also have to create space in our interactions for opportunities to emerge, be glimpsed, and acted on. We also have to stimulate talent by allowing it to find distinctive ways forward to key outcomes. In addition, we have to evaluate talent on its willingness to practice and move towards excellence in ways that make a pragmatic difference.
• Passion Liberator 9: Find those behaviors of ours that inhibit passion in others or frustrate the level of results we're after. By asking for ongoing future-focused input from key stakeholders, we create our own self-improvement program and coaching community. As we seek to coach others, we have to first see people as valuable and worthwhile, not as utilities or means to an end. Once we see them in that way, we can be leaders, team-members and coaches, not just superficially "act" that way.
A Call to Action
Before we can ask others to become passion liberators, we have to ask ourselves first. We motivate ourselves by realizing we live in our work culture, and it behooves us to help make it as healthy, potential-furthering, and encouraging as possible. Taking such action grows our leadership brand and capability. And by getting other key influentials to join us, we can lead a positive evolution, if not revolution.
As with all change, we should hype it as it happens and make sure liberated passion is focused on our visionary purpose. When we begin to behave our way to our vision, with consistent commitment, our natural passion for great relationships and great results will come to the fore and liberate us fully to grow, connect, and deliver.
Omar Khan is a global leadership consultant, and co-author with Paul B. Brown, of "Liberating Passion: How The World's Best Global Leaders Produce Winning Results." For more information, visit www.sensei-international.com.
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