There is a great conversation going on over on the Punk Rock HR blog about passion and whether or not passion can be or should be measured as part of employee performance . Some say passion is generally not a term that is synonymous with work and others say that passion is not a measurable performance dimension. I have a slightly different take on this…that passion manifests itself in different ways in different people and there’s no one right way to spot it.
This became apparent to me twice this week for two different reasons. I’m currently reading the book Look Me in the Eye, a memoir by John Elder Robinson (brother of Running With Scissors author, Augusten Burroughs) about growing up and living with Asperger’s syndrome. Throughout the memoir, Robinson’s passion for what he does (he is a creative genius with savant-like engineering design skills) is obvious to the reader, but perhaps not to his supervisors who describe him as arrogant, not a team player, and a poor manager. As an Aspergian who often struggles with how to react in certain social situations, his passion for figuring out how things work was sometimes overshadowed by the fact that he relates to the world around him in a way that is different than others and often misinterpreted.
My second realization of how easy it can be to misinterpret or totally miss someone’s passion came during a conversation I had with a friend recently. He is in sales and his job is pretty stressful. He doesn’t earn a base salary and only makes money when he makes a sale. He’s basically on call seven days a week, people are always trying to get in touch with him at all hours of the day and night, and he needs to routinely deal with a lot of product defects, bureaucracy, and customers with unrealistic expectations. Needless to say, there are a lot of things that can go wrong and many things to complain about in his line of work. Yet the way he complains about all the uncertainty of what he does is also the telltale sign of how passionate he is about what he does. Now if you told him this he would probably roll his eyes or make a wisecrack like “Yeah, I guess I’m passionate about paying my rent” but I can tell that he is passionate about the satisfaction derived from working through all the problems, influencing customers, and ultimately closing the sale. But I’m not sure if he had a boss that person would recognize his style as passionate (luckily he is self-employed).
I would have to agree with Punk Rock HR blogger Laurie Reuttimann’s take on passion…that you own it, not your company, and organizations probably shouldn’t be trying to measure something that is really impossible to define in a consistent way.
Are you passionate about what you do in an offbeat, non-traditional, hard to measure way? I’d like to hear your story.