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Debunking Myths About Worker Passion

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“Your dream employee: She searches for new, better, solutions to challenging problems, takes meaningful risks to improve performance, performs at a higher level of performance with each passing year, works the hours needed to get the job done, is well connected to others internally and externally who work in related domains, and cuts across silos to deliver results.”

The reality of today’s workplace is the exact opposite. According to a new report by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, around 88 percent of the workforce lack this kind of passion, and the enhanced productivity that goes along with it.

Passion is more important than engagement

Passion is different from, and more important than, engagement. “Employee engagement is typically defined,” the report says, "by how happy workers are with their work setting, coworkers, organization-wide programs, and their overall treatment by their employer. Employee engagement is important, and improving it typically will give a firm a bump in performance. But engagement is often a one-time bump; employees move from unhappy to happy, bring a better attitude to work, and possibly take fewer sick days. However, workers who are merely engaged won’t actively seek to achieve higher performance levels, to the benefit of self and firm; passionate workers will, though.”

By contrast, passion in workers relates to “how they respond to challenges. Do they get excited by, and actively seek out, challenges? How do they solve problems? How do they learn, develop skills, and build their careers over the long term? How do they interact with others to pursue those goals? … [They] help themselves and the companies they work for develop the capabilities to constantly learn and improve performance. Rather than a one-time performance bump, [passionate workers] deliver sustained and significant performance improvement over time.”

Debunking key myths about worker passion

Deloitte’s report debunks five key myths surrounding worker passion:

  • Myth 1: Only youth is passionate:  Deloitte’s research shows that older workers are just as likely to be passionate as younger workers. Passionate workers are not concentrated in any age group.
  • Myth 2: Small firms nurture passion better: Large firms are equally as effective, or ineffective, at cultivating passion in the workforce as smaller firms.
  • Myth 3: Passionate workers congregate in certain regions. Deloitte’s research found that a worker's place of residence did not influence the likelihood of worker passion.
  • Myth 4:  More education nurtures passion. The research showed that educational attainment overall did not have a statistically significant impact on worker passion.
  • Myth 5: It’s the knowledge workers. While passionate workers are overrepresented at higher corporate levels (around 18-20 percent), some front-line workers reported being passionate (around 6 percent).

"The key message from our work is that workers of all types and in all locations have the potential to be passionate – it's not limited to a privileged few," concludes John Hagel, c0-chairman Deloitte Center For The Edge. "Rather than just focusing on recruiting more passionate workers, the big opportunity is to look at the existing workforce and create environments that can tap into, nurture and amplify the passion of every worker already on the job. Without the right work environments, efforts to recruit additional passionate workers will likely be undermined as those new workers become frustrated in environments that do not support passion."

“Unfortunately,” the report says, “not only do many companies not recognize the value of worker passion, they view it with suspicion. Many work environ­ments are actually hostile to it. The types of processes and policies designed to minimize risk taking and variances from standard proce­dures effectively discourage passion.  Passionate workers in search of new challenges and learning opportunities are viewed as unpre­dictable, and thus risky.”

The fact that only 20 percent of senior management is passionate about their work is a stunning indictment of current management practices.

Tactics for catalyzing passion

Deloitte’s report goes on to identify tactics for finding and developing these qualities within the workforce, including tangible steps for how companies can create work environments that unlock worker passion at all levels of the existing workforce. These include:

  • Encouraging workers to work cross-functionally
  • Encouraging workers to work on projects they are interested in, even on those outside of their responsibilities
  • Encouraging workers to connect with others both in the firm and in their industry
  • Engaging with customers to innovate new product and service ideas.
  • Defining high-impact challenges by helping workers and teams to focus on the areas of highest business impact, learning, and sustainable improvement.
  • Augmenting workers’ impact with the right infrastructure, such as platforms that enable collaboration both inside and outside the firm and across ecosystems.
  • Recruiting workers who are more inclined to be passionate about their work.

Tactics vs strategy

The tactics suggested by Deloitte’s report are certainly steps in the right direction. One also needs to keep in mind that these steps by themselves may not be effective unless the strategy, goals and compensation policies of the entire organization are aligned with them.

“The core issue, " Hagel told me, "is  that our companies are built on a model of scalable efficiency that is pervasive throughout the operations, organization, strategy and mindset of executives and profoundly hostile to tapping into and amplifying the passion of individuals – emphasis on predictability, tight specification of all work, standardization of all work and tight integration of all work activity – where’s the room for passion?"

Compensation: Passion is related to a perception of fairness. If the gains in worker productivity are not reflected in pay, is it realistic to expect worker passion to be anything but abysmal, no matter what steps are taken at the level of the workplace? Thus since the 1970s, almost all the aggregate gains in productivity generated by workers have been siphoned off for other purposes, rather than in the prior period, when gains in productivity were shared with the entire workforce.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/01/art3full.pdf

Where did that money go? "The Shift Index," says Hagel, "shows that cash compensation to knowledge workers (creative talent) has gone up substantially in recent decades – creating a growing gap with compensation to the rest of the workforce. But the more important point is that our research suggests passionate workers are far less motivated by extrinsic rewards than intrinsic rewards."

Share buybacks: Yet when workers read William Lazonick’s article, Profits Without Prosperity, in Harvard Business Review, and see that in 2004-2013, some $3.4 trillion has been diverted to shareholders and top management through share buybacks, at the expense of workers, innovation and investment—corporate practices that even the pro-business journal, The Economist, has called “corporate cocaine”—how likely is it that workers will be positively passionate about their work, regardless of what cross-functional collaborative platforms or work assignments are put in place?

Purpose: The fact that among senior management, who benefit from gargantuan compensation, only 20 percent are passionate about their work suggests that it’s not a matter of money alone. Corporate purpose also comes into the picture. If the goal of the organization as a whole is to maximize shareholder value, as it is in many large publicly-owned corporations today, one has to ask: is this the kind of a goal that will inspire positive passion in workers or management?

Is it not more likely in fact that workers and managers alike will agree with Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, that maximizing shareholder value is “the dumbest idea in the world,” or with Xavier Huillard, CEO of the Vinci group, that that goal is “totally idiotic”?

Scalable learning vs scalable efficiency: Merely having the right goal may not be enough. “Our research suggests,” says Hagel, “that the passion is much more domain specific related to a specific industry or area of expertise and that the real motivation is to have more and more impact by getting to higher levels of performance within that domain. A broader purpose certainly helps in this regard but if it is not translated into a frontal assault on the scalable efficiency model there will be very little progress in unleashing passion – pursuing a noble purpose with scalable efficiency as the operating model will just frustrate workers even more.”

When such goals and management practices prevail at the very top level of the organization, the positive impact of better practices adopted lower down in the workplace may be much less. When workers and managers see that the organization as a whole is pursuing a goal that is somewhere between “the world’s dumbest idea” and “totally idiotic,” and adopts management practices oriented to scalable efficiency rather than scalable learning, we are likely to find passion in the workforce, but it won't be the right kind of passion. It will be anger directed at executive greed and corporate stupidity.

And read also:

The Dumbest Idea In the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value

How The World’s Dumbest Idea Killed The Economic Recovery

Why The Dumbest Idea In The World Is Finally Dying

Has Capitalism Reached A Turning Point?

The five surprises of radical management

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Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning