Your People Need to be Passionate About Their Work and It’s Your Job to Make It So

Generating enthusiasm, or passion, for what you do is essential. It is doubly so in perilous times. When everything around us seems to be coming apart, a leader who has a passion for what he does is essential. Such a spirit fuels the engine of enthusiasm needed to spark the enterprise. More importantly, such passion is vital to convincing others that the work matters. It is easy to get discouraged by today's business news and so it is vital that someone, be it the CEO or another senior leader, serves as the organization's designated cheerleader.

Ultimately instilling passion for the work is not an exercise in rah-rah; it is a search for meaning and significance. So how can you cultivate passion for work in others and do it in ways that have significance? Here are some suggestions.

Focus on the positive. Passion in leaders can be palpable; you know in an instant that the executive cares about the company. In my experience, those senior leaders who stroll through the halls with a nod or good word to say to all are those executives who get things done. And it is because they are out and about, not cloistered in their offices on mahogany row. Rather, they are meeting with employees and customers, vendors and investors, getting to know issues and concerns. They also use these times to talk up the good things.

Address the negatives. Passionate leaders aren’t blinded by an unconscious positive bias of sorts; they know the score, precisely because they spend so much time out of their offices. They see firsthand what is working and what is not, and because they have a relationship with people at all levels of the company, they can more readily mobilize employees to solve problems. Remembering that bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.

Set high expectations. Those who care about the work and set a high standard challenge others to do the same, but they should remember to balance their approach — knowing to sometimes ease up on workloads but never on expectations.
As much as generating passion for the work matters, it is no guarantee of success, or even survival. Radiating passion is no excuse for ignoring attention to the fundamentals.

Yet successful organizations are more than the sum of fiscal prudence. Good ones are the collective values and aspirations of dedicated people who have made a choice to work there. Such organizations, be they in healthcare or manufacturing, consumer goods or hospitality, ultimately depend upon the commitment of individuals pulling together to make things work. That's why you need leaders who have a passion for what they do and are able to spread that passion to others so that people feel better about what they do, and ultimately, what they can do better.