Passion and Repsonsibility in Business9thFebruary
By Tony Deis
Let me introduce you to one of the most powerful business tools in the world:
The feelings of passion and responsibility.
A person that is passionate about a project, such as a dedicated artist, is fully willing to tend to that project. Work and leisure fuse in a healthy way. A person who feels responsibility for others, such as a caring parent, will draw on many reserves in the face of great challenges. In the end, the two words mean the same thing:
what you truly care for
For a business person, parent or teacher working with and in teams, this is critical to understanding the gifts of your team members and yourself. It is critical to understand where people are the most useful.
Today we look around and may see a failure of the "free market". Yet viewed through the lens of true freedom, through the understanding of passion and responsibility, it can be seen as a failure of many businesses that relied too much on "control". Many corporations are filled with employees clearly dispassionate about what they do. Only feeling responsible for the bi-monthly stipend (paycheck) they receive. They are not responsible, and certainly not passionate, for the inner machinations of the company they work for. The paycheck becomes more a prevention of punishment than a return for healthy service. People will do anything to keep their house and feed their family.
One argument for letting people work jobs they are unhappy with is, "Someone has to do the dirty work." I may argue for a moment that everyone is better off doing their own dirty work, but for now I will stay with 2 ideas that are more palatable.
1) there are actually people that are passionate about doing things other people are not
2) give a person enough trust and faith and you greatly increase their accountability and passion for anything
The first statement is perhaps less radical, so let's start with "finding the right people for the job" or "finding the passionate people for the dirty job". When I worked at Multnomah County Outdoor School back in my forlorn youth, I eventually ended up as a Field Instructor. My job was to take kids out in the woods and track animals: something I felt a lot of "passion and responsibility" for. Plus, I was good at it. Unfortunately Outdoor School has always been a great program limited in resources. Staff and campers had to do double duty during clean up. There were many jobs: taking out the compost, recycling, cleaning up the dining hall and the most infamous, Roustabouts! (which is basically a fancy term for cleaning toilets). Cleaning toilets used by one hundred sixth graders eating bad lunch food is not most people's idea of a good time. I came to love it. I quickly realized that because the students rarely did a perfect job I had an excuse to dismiss them early from their duties and tend to all the stalls and sinks myself. I reveled in this point in the day I had to simply be alone and think. No assistant staff asking what to do next, no 11 year old "dudes" posturing with each other, and no trying to solve any complex problems. I only had to make things clean! Make the throne shine. It was the most simple thing I could do to improve the quality of life for over one hundred people. I was really passionate about cleaning the toilets so no one ever had to tell me to do a better job. I immediately understood all the positive results I got out of it. I cleaned toilets willingly and with gusto. Sincerely, I was the right, passionate person for the work of scrubbing and flushing.
What can we learn from this? Instead of forcing someone, or worse, hoping that someone will do a job just right, why not build into your management (or family) a system of identifying daily what needs to be done. Then being very thorough and clear about whether the "volunteer" even has an inkling of passion for the task. If there is not passion, they are clearly not the right person. If you cannot find the right person, keep trying or find a way to eliminate the job. This the health and value of people over systems. The effort it takes to find an individual who truly works with 100% of themselves in what they do is well worth the effort it saves in nagging or micro-managing their work.
And now to our second groundbreaking (or stabilizing) proposal: Give a person enough trust and faith and you greatly increase their accountability and passion for anything. I hope you can remember a moment when your dad (or mom) trusted you to cook dinner, hammer a nail or go to the store. It was a defining moment, not only did you want to keep fingers safe but you wanted to do it right. You wanted them to trust you after the first time. This need for trust is hardwired into humans. Remember now, I am talking about family relationships built upon care and open rapport. You tend to want to care for the people that show they care for you. Its a fact. And even just as relevant, you want to be trusted. Think about what it feels like when someone is always looking over your shoulder; it is hard to stay in the moment and focus on the steps you need to take to get your work done. Constantly splitting your attention, talking to your boss, or worse, the fear of doing a bad job, is draining. It does not allow you to offer up 100% of your energy. This is the dark side of "checking in". Too often in our business (and school) cultures we are punished by admitting to our human errors and not allowed to simply experience the results. In fact, corporal punishments in management actually insulate people from experiencing and learning from the results of our choices. More and more, when I see someone make a mistake (which is relative) my only response is, "yeah, that's happened to me also, what do you need from me and can I help you rectify it?" This is simply a small aspect of trust and faith.
Trust and faith, giving more responsibility, is actually about believing that common sense comes naturally to humans. Now, I already hear gasps of disbelief in this. Many of you are pointing to the state of the world, to all the dramatic crazies even in your daily life, to our current administration. I gently take a different perspective. I take the perspective of a tracker and hunter-gatherer.
Many people try to teach animal tracking as a complex skill. A mysterious craft of accomplishment cultivated over many years. I can say from over a decade of experience teaching "tracking", that many of its more complex understandings and technical skills are actually very easy for people to grasp. In fact it is innate. Animal tracking, like any quality of a hunter-gatherer, is the art of letting every experience carry its own lesson. The art of learning and interpreting new information constantly and quickly. There is no such thing as a "model" that teaches anyone how to track. In truth, the more I trust and have free conversations with the experiences of my students, the more nimble and agile their thought process is. The best kind of responsibility is driven by natural consequences (not ones that a boss imposes). We have evolved to learn and adapt to this tension between natural consequences and the support of our family and tribe.
And that is the crux of real responsibility, of faith and trust. Everyone needs an opportunity to contribute to the real team. They need a chance for their work to really matter. I am not talking about the glib mission statements or marketing campaigns about teamwork that businesses spend millions of dollars on. Nor on the airy new age ceremonies of community bonding. If you are really part of a powerful team, one you care about, you can feel it in your bones. Your teammates sincerely ask you to do a good job. Better yet, you are sincerely, fully trusted to do a great job.
And the irony is, this is not simply a testament for the manager, parent or teacher, it is a testament to anyone that finds themselves in a team that needs to work more healthfully together.
