Pillar 2: Lead with Passion

What is Passion?

Passion is not an intellectual thought. It is a feeling, an emotion.

Click here to view a video by Steve Jobs on passion in work.

A Burning Desire or Hunger

Mahatma Gandhi had a burning desire or hunger to help his fellow human beings. He had a burning desire to spread awareness of two basic principles – truth and non-violence – and his vision was so powerful that most people in his country indeed eventually adopted these principles. Gandhi was a passionate man and his passion enabled him to produce extraordinary results.

A Feeling of Inspiration

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

A Feeling in the Pit of the Stomach

If thinking about an issue, task, or activity gives you a ‘hit’ in the stomach, with nerves tingling, pressure, or palpitations, you could be passionate.

A Sense of Excitement

Like the example in the preceding paragraph, your excitement may arise in your stomach, or any of your five senses. How do you know you are excited? Where is the excitement located? Where in your body do you feel the emotion?

It can be something you see in your mind’s eye; it can be something you hear in your head; it can be the incredible lightness of being; it can be a taste or a smell. Each one of us has a unique mix of these sensual experiences when we are excited. Becoming aware of your own unique mix will help you recognize states of true excitement.

The State of Arousal

Being aroused is different to being excited. How different is it for you? Sometimes, the passion could be arousal caused by an injustice, such as the unjust treatment of children. The state of arousal is different from an ‘excited’ state.

A Feeling of Limitless Energy

Passionate people do not easily get tired. Which people around you demonstrate such limitless energy? Would you describe them as passionate? Do you envy their energy, and their apparent ability to work harder than most people?

The Feeling that ‘I Shouldn’t be Paid for Doing This; I am Having Too Much Fun!’

The way that we earn a living or work, does not have to be boring, dull and uninspiring. However, the statistic I quoted earlier – that less than 10 percent of workers in Australia impress their fellow workers as being passionate – can easily cause most people to believe that work, almost by definition, is a struggle and something that can only be enjoyed in exceptional or unusual times.

If you are not passionate about your work, then it is hard to see how it could be fun. What would it be like if work was so much fun that you would do it for nothing? Or, alternatively, if you had R10 million in the bank, would you do the work you are now doing? If the answer is ‘yes’, you are clearly passionate.

The Belief that Nothing is Too much Trouble

The rewards for me, in those circumstances, were greater than the fees. The rewards for a job well done, of a grateful client, of seeing a little more fairness, created a sense of well-being that generated and fuelled the desire to repeat such moments.

A Clarity of Vision

Can you ‘see’ what business or enterprise you are trying to create for the future? Can you see how it will operate?

The quality of the picture in your mind’s eye will demonstrate to you the power of your passion. Passionate people have a spectacularly clear picture of what they want to create, and of how the world will be when they have achieved their passion.

A Sense of Caring Deeply

What do you care about? Who do you care about? This is a slightly different experience from the feeling that nothing is too much trouble, but when you care, you have greater energy, a greater ability to create, and a greater ability to produce. Caring comes from a part of us that is more than body or mind: it is a soul connection or a heart-to-heart connection.

Leadership and Passion

If you as a leader or manager have not been willing or courageous enough to do your own work of introspection, then you will not be able to encourage your employees to do so!

Decide that you want to find your passion, and, as you progress along the path of inner wisdom and inner knowing, the path toward self-knowledge, your ability to bring your employees with you and to motivate them to access their own passion will increase in direct proportions.

How to Ignite and Nurture Passion at Work

Discover the Highest Possible Purpose for your Business

Your business has a higher purpose than just making a profit. The higher the purpose you can find, the more willing the employees will be to engage their minds as well as their hearts. If a business is just about making money, many people will refuse to engage all three aspects of their humanness and simply do their job for their salary. The leader will be left yearning for more and wondering why he/she ‘cannot find good employees these days’!

Discover the higher purpose and spread the message to all your employees.

Beware, however, of false messages; if the leaders do not believe in the higher purpose, it will not have the desired impact on the employees. Here are some questions that will help you to discover or remember the higher purpose of your business:

• Why was the business established?
• What contribution does the business make to its customers’ lives?
• What value is the business adding?
• What contribution does the business make to our planet?
• Who benefits from the different activities of the business?
• What will be the benefits, other than financial gain, if the business achieves its goals?

A clearly articulated higher purpose has great power and attraction for employees as well as customers.

Discover and Eliminate Suppressors of Spirit and Soul

The spirit of employees can be suppressed in many ways. Wide-eyed, excited youngsters (or even the more experienced veteran), arriving for work on their first day, soon fall into the mould of putting up with the daily grind! How can this syndrome be avoided?

Demonstrate that the Business is About More than Making a Profit

This process is complementary to the process of discovering the higher purpose. The key word is to ‘demonstrate’, as opposed to just making statements. A recurring theme, in companies and organisations that I have worked with, is the conflict between what is said to be important and the actual behaviour of leaders. These conflicts must be minimized to allow passion and spirit to flourish.

Living up to the values of the business is the key way to demonstrate this principle and leaders should take the opportunity to show and tell employees that the values are being observed. Repetition is important. Leaders and managers may think that the employees have been shown that values have been put into practice in the past, but all of us have so many contrary experiences that believing and trusting that values will be practised takes time.

Engage Employees in the Dream and the Passion that Started the Business

Every business is unique and has a unique history. Today, every business that exists on the planet started as one human being’s dream, which then became a thought or idea, and in the case of the great businesses, was driven by a passion. What is the dream and the passion that created the history of your business? When was the last time that the employees heard the history? Has the dream ever been shared with them?

Engage Employees’ Hearts as well as Their Minds

All human beings have feelings!

However, most businesses seem to deny this fundamental human trait.

Does your business allow the existence and utilization of feelings? If not, you are reducing the opportunities for the existence of passion.

‘WIFL’ – ‘What I Feel Like Saying’

Each of the teams in your business, whenever a formal meeting starts, can start with a ‘WIFL’. This requires team members to access their feelings. Each team member speaks, without interruption, for an agreed period or for as long as that person feels like talking. This is not a thinking process, and through practice, team members become more comfortable with expressing their unique perspectives without feeling the need to censor or suppress their truth.

The group leader’s commitment to the process is the most important factor in ensuring that it is effective; if the leader does not fully and openly participate, the employees will certainly not do so. One of the key elements of the process is for others to listen actively without interruption and this lack of interruption is most unusual today! Another key element is that there is no judgment of what team members say. There is no need to justify our feelings, and correspondingly, there is no need for others to take on any blame for the feelings of others. This is easy to say and difficult to do, but the long-term benefits of regular WIFLs are proven.

WIFLs are also opportunities to express what we are feeling and to get into the practice of raising our awareness levels of those feelings.

Make Employees Feel Important

Employees can feel that they are important and valued. Telling them that this is the case will not create the feelings. If they do not feel it, they will not believe it!

Here are some of the deeds by which a leader can demonstrate that his or her employees are important and valuable:

Commit to their ongoing learning and development and do something about it by organizing and investing in relevant programmes.

Understand that attending a training programme will not cause radical changes in the employees overnight; with a learning programme I like a golf lesson – we learn the techniques, but for change to occur, ongoing repetition, practice and mistakes are also required!

Give all employees clarity about what is expected of them in the workplace and how their performances will be assessed.

Give employees the right to complain when the values of the business are not being observed.

Commit to communicating with employees and make allowance for their unique perspectives; this includes telling them when they have done something right as well as when they have done something incorrectly.

Commit to a process of giving more trust to employees. This process, by definition, cannot be achieved overnight, but until the leader demonstrates trust, the employees will not be willing to trust. Trust needs to be built like a brick wall, brick by brick, day by day and there needs to be a high awareness of how easily and quickly the brick wall can be demolished.