SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Liberating Passion: How the World's Best Global Leaders Produce Winning Results
January 22, 2009
By Omar Khan
Passionate people are hired into most leading companies. Within three months, however, the passion is often gone. Companies are "passion castrators" in many ways. Let's go through a few examples of how passion killing happens:
• We don't induct people properly. People don't understand their own roles, the goals of the company, the culture they are to participate in, or how to forge forward and win in a new arena.
• We lack mentors. Without a mentor or coach, people try to apply the behaviors that worked in their last positions. They often don't gain new skills or ways of thinking. If they manage to get the job done, it is often in a way that is dysfunctional or excessively idiosyncratic. As a result, when they move on, they leave scant knowledge for their successors. Collective learning is stunted rather than institutionalized. A vacuum remains rather than a living culture. When unmentored and under-coached managers continue their progress in the company, they become senior leaders bereft of elementary management skills or leadership abilities. Though they may have a knack for producing some results one way or another, the opportunity cost, the human debris, and the collective unfulfilled potential along the way can be devastating.
• We give paltry feedback until a formal review looms. What feedback we do give tends to be negative. So people only learn what they are not doing well. Unsurprisingly, they try to duck feedback since it is associated with negative reinforcement.
Unfortunately, there are endless, similar examples of how we manage to muffle, diminish, and outright kill passion. Passion killers remain in place, despite their evident destructive impact, because to confront them would require re-engineering fundamental attitudes that appear most evidently in relationships. In fact, the underlying malaise, the pre-eminent passion killer at the root of all the above examples is poor communication leading to poor relationships.
Are there antidotes? Yes, there are passion liberators—interactions, behaviors, and tools that can take us forward to the vision and culture we truly want. Such passion liberators include creating authentic relationships; developing a shared, strategic vision; getting to the root of issues through honest conversations; claiming accountability for problems and successes; and appreciating others' potential. Passion liberators allow us to eliminate the division between who we are and what we do. They allow us to convert leadership from a set of grand intentions into a wonderful way to engage and evoke the best in each other.
Leadership is fundamentally about how we relate to others, how we engage, mobilize, focus, and ignite each other—or fail to. The authenticity, imagination, and commitment with which we engage each other are fundamental sources of passion. Let's liberate our latent passion and that of our teams. There is no better source of, or report card for, organizational and personal excellence.
Omar Khan is the founder and senior partner of Sensei International. His new book is LIBERATING PASSION: How The World’s Best Global Leaders Produce Winning Results (Wiley & Sons, $19.95).
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Incentive Index |
|
|
