Hi folks! I mentioned last week that we have quite a bit in the works at the Retreat Ranch. People often wonder how I balance it all, the ranch is just one of my businesses and so are my roles as an Executive Coach and Keynote Speaker. What I can say, is I’ve created a passionate team culture that motivates AND keeps me accountable to win. It’s important to be passionate about whatever it is you choose to invest your life in. Life is short, and we’ve got to make the best use of our time. Get your coffee and let’s talk about the benefits of a passionate team culture in the workplace.
Passion is Required for a Winning Team Culture
In any business setting you will find leaders and staff that are more passionate about their job than others. Usually, these are high performers who are driven by their own internal need to succeed and exceed their KPIs.
As a business owner, I’d love an office (or ranch!) that’s made up of 100% passionate staff. I do my best to vet those that work on my team but at times a few bad eggs may slip through. Now, I won’t get too much into this because you should know by now, I’m a firm believer in hire fast, fire faster (and btw, by bad eggs I mean just not a good fit overall).
I acknowledge that not everyone may be passionate about their job or business, some are just in it for the paycheck. But again, I return to the salient point that passion is required to foster a winning team culture in the business world. Usually there is a significant difference in revenue in companies where employees just show up to work versus those who are driven to excel in their career. Creating passion is by no means easy, especially given those “I’m just here for a paycheck” folks. However, what separates the best organizations and people from the average, is the ability to overcome challenges, especially those at the cultural level.
How to Improve Passion in a Team Culture
There are a few actions individuals and leaders can easily practice to infuse passion in their corporate culture. I’ve summarized them under three areas:
- Do Something You Love
- Make Passion a Requirement
- Encourage Passion
Let’s discuss each one some more.
Do Something You Love
I want to point out here that a person doesn’t need to love all aspects of the product or services they provide. They can be passionate about specific tasks under their job portfolio, like selling, interacting with customers (or horses!).
Being passionate is not so much what you do, but WHY and HOW you do it. Leaders and employees alike should strive to find something passionate about their jobs or careers. If that’s not possible then keep going and find something you are passionate about, this job or business will not prove sustainable in the end (not to mention life is too damn short).
Make Passion a Requirement
Most leaders can look at their team and easily identify the members that are passionate about their career and the organization, and in almost every case, those people are the most successful.
To play the devil’s advocate, it could be argued that passion and attitude are subjective and cannot be measured or managed. Okay, that can be true in some cases, but it doesn’t negate the obvious that when we love what we do, we tend to give more of ourselves. When we don’t, it can be a drag.
A leader should look to do two things here to help those without passion find it in their job or within the organization:
- Make passion mandatory by rewarding top performers. It could be simple rewards, like spending more time coaching with you or even gift cards to local restaurants. The idea is to make it fun and track the progress publicly. Those who are against engaging in this corporate culture will either organically remove themselves or have you remove them.
- Don’t reward bad performers. I’m looking you in the eye right now and I want you to remember a time you’ve seen a bad performer get celebrated for doing practically nothing. How did you feel? Yep, like crap. If you’ve not left that position, you’re probably plotting a way out. Top performers who are passionate and highly motivated will NOT stick around to celebrate losing.
Encourage Passion
Passion is not an emotion that is taught; rather it is the result of a person doing the right job or having the right career.
Leaders should also take the time to recognize individuals that lack passion and strive to help them find it in their career. In today’s turbulent economy, doing an average job can spell the end of your business and/or career. But again, if you find yourself expending too much effort on a member of staff who just doesn’t and won’t even care, let them go.
Another way to encourage passion in your team’s culture is to be passionate about your job and show it! A zealous leader sets the standard for their team members and is the benchmark for the organization. By living it, you are mandating that others follow suit. Passion is the fuel for an organization’s success no matter what industry, region, or economy one’s business or career exists in.
Final Thoughts on Encouraging a Passionate Team Culture
I’ll leave you with a quote from my book, The Sales Leaders Gameplan:
See you here next week.
