The Mindset

In yet another great article J. Timothy King describes the importance of passion at work, how it motivates people and make them do great things. The last section in this article is titled Don’t take it for granted:

“When we take passion for granted, we discourage the best motivator we have.”

No one should stay indifferent when reading this. This statement touches each and every one of us, whether you are a manager or a developer, whether you are passionate about your work or your passion has already been turned off. This sentence captures the workplace experience of many of us so accurately.

But what does it mean to “jinx the passion”? Why do so many people seem to suffer from jinxed passion?

Here are a few passion killers you might want to avoid if you want to keep your employees passionate and motivated:

Ambiguous Messages

Nothing kills passion faster than ambiguous messages. When goals, expectations, and feedback keep changing every other day you start feeling confused. Soon after, you start being apathetic. You know that no matter what you do, the chances for it to be “the right thing to do” depends on the whims of your boss. So, you stop caring.

Our business environment and the industry as a whole are overwhelmed with uncertainty. Nothing seems to be fixed. Sending a clear message and having a solid vision makes the working environment more stable. It makes people feel reassure and therefore do a better job. They know (at high level) what they are expected to do, so they can relate to it and be passionate about it.

You can’t be passionate about a different thing every couple of days.

Lack of Professionalism

I don’t know anyone who is passionate about being an amateur, whose goal is to create bad (or merely mediocre) products. Deep inside, most people want to be professionals. Doing a great job is something to be passionate about.

When the environment you work in prevents you from doing things professionally it is much more difficult to be passionate about your work. You know what has to be done, and you know how to do it well, but the organizational culture (or your managers) doesn’t let you do it. It gets even worse when eventually you need to clean up the mess created by things you know shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Any shred of passion you had left, will now be gone.

Professionals have a tendency to expect their environment to be professional as well (or at least they expect it to aspire to professionalism). They cannot be passionate about working unprofessionally.

Vague Career Path

People like to know where they are going. People, especially in an industry such as ours, need to know they will advance professionally. At least most of them do. Without a clear professional career path people don’t have something to aspire to. They might have some aspiration at start. But when they realize they do not control their future, the flame will soon go out.

Does that mean everyone must be automatically promoted after a certain time? Of course not. This is not a well-planned career path. But everyone must know that if they they are professionals and if they do a good job, they will be appreciated for it. Being appreciate for it means receiving greater responsibility, authority and recognition.

***

Although this should be more or less obvious, I feel a need to say it explicitly: all these issues are not only good for the individuals; they are the interest of the organization .

Keeping a person who does a great job on the same position for years is the easy solution – it is not the right one from the human resources perspective. Sending ambiguous messages will not only cause people to lose their passion – It will cause them to fail doing their job right. And of course, lack of professionalism is a sure recipe for poor quality and a waste for valuable resources.

Your passionate people are a good scale for knowing how well things are in your team or in the organization as a whole.

If you have passionate people on your team you should do you best to keep them. If you can’t find any, you should really ask yourself where did you go wrong?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Organizational Culture, Management, Professionalism, Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.