Passionate workers perform better. But to truly unlock potential, leaders need to focus on cultivating a unique kind of passion among their employees.
When most leaders talk about passion, they talk about workers who will work nights and weekends on their assigned tasks without questions or complaints. However, based on research assessing environments where there is sustained, extreme performance improvement, it turns out the participants in these environments all have a very specific form of passion—the passion of the explorer.
This explorative passion has three components. First, people with this passion are excited about achieving greater impact in a specific domain. This could be anything from gardening to nuclear physics. They are also excited when confronted with unexpected challenges and see them as an opportunity to achieve even greater impact. Third, when confronted with those unexpected challenges, their first reaction is to connect with others and ask for help. They realize that, no matter how smart and talented they are, they will achieve much greater impact when they come together with others.
The challenge is that large organizations are typically suspicious of people with an explorer’s style of passion. Traditionalists might say these people ask too many questions, they take too many risks, and they deviate from their assigned scripts.
Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that a survey of the U.S. workforce revealed that only 14% of workers pursue their passion for exploration in their work. We need to recognize how limiting these environments are and evolve these environments so that they actually encourage us to explore.
In a rapidly changing world, one option is to encourage workers to seek out challenges that they have only recently encountered. As an example, a clinical laboratory company was experiencing increasing customer churn rates because they were not getting the answers they needed from the call center department.
The head of this department brought all his employees together and started by assuring them that they would all continue to be employed. Then, he said that their first assignment was to work with the IT department to figure out how all the routine calls they were receiving could be automated. As they freed up their time, their next assignment was to identify the really challenging calls they had never received before and come together into small groups of five employees to come up with creative answers to the customer issues.
In a short period of time, customer satisfaction went way up, and the workers in the call center department began to experience the passion of the explorer as they discovered they were able to address problems that had never been encountered before. They were being rewarded for abandoning the scripts that had consumed their work and delivering more and more value to customers in need.
One reason a passion for exploration is so important now is that it can help unleash the true potential of artificial intelligence. AI can take over most routine work, freeing workers to pursue new opportunities and challenges that are becoming more prevalent in virtually every environment. As workers are freed up from their routine tasks, they can begin to cultivate an explorer’s passion, which will help them develop capabilities such as curiosity, imagination, creativity, and collaboration. These skills can especially help workers deliver more value and put them in the best position to not be replaced
Another approach that can help cultivate the passion of the explorer is the zoom out/zoom in approach. This strategy focuses on two very different time horizons. Zooming out challenges leaders to look ahead 10 to 20 years and identify a much larger emerging opportunity to pursue. When zooming in, the focus shifts to six to 12 months. The challenge here is to identify two to three powerful initiatives that could accelerate progress towards the bigger, long-term opportunity.
By identifying a very large and inspiring opportunity in the future, leaders can help draw out the passion of the explorer among workers. This passion can become even stronger if workers can see tangible progress being made over the short-term. Plus, it can make them even more excited about participating in an effort to address opportunities that are only beginning to emerge.