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Developing a Passion for Performance

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins characterized two common denominators of Level 5 leaders. One was humility and the second was a passion for performance. This article deals with the passion aspect of leadership and gives some tips for how to generate more of it.

Developing a Passion for Performance

Great leaders are passionate people. They have a perpetual fire in the belly for their goals and vision. They show by deeds and words that they will not be deterred from their mission.

In the work setting, great leaders are passionate about performance. They know how to translate urgency into positive action. Contrast this with poor leaders who get all excited about the need to do better but can't translate it well to people. They use all kinds of exhortations, even threats. There is much arm waving and gum flapping, but it does not connect with people. Why? There is little passion, just frantic excitement! The real leader has a different intensity, one that does not require loud rhetoric or threats because it is backed up with demonstrable passion from within. It is the smoldering white-hot fire of true resolve that people recognize and follow. While the poor leader practically shouts words in rapid succession, the true leader often talks in low volume with a slow deliberate cadence.

The passionate leader becomes energized in the face of problems. Rather than hoping for some miracle to make things better, energy is focused on solving the problem. The real kick is found in performing beyond expectations. She inspires people to routinely do things they never dreamed possible, creating winners. People catch the infectious enthusiasm and ride it like a racehorse from one victory to another. Problems and setbacks are merely hurdles to be crossed with care.

Passionate leaders are more than involved. They are totally committed to excellence. For them, nothing less will satisfy. The brass ring is what they seek and what they must have.

Jack Welch of General Electric placed a high value on passion. He modeled it himself and took every opportunity to instill it among the people. His frequent visits to GE's institute at Crotonville, often called "the Harvard of corporate America," would stress this. In his book, "jack: Straight from the Gut" he put it this way:

"Whenever I went to Crotonville and asked a class what qualities define an ‘A player,' it always made me happiest to see the first hand go up and say, ‘Passion.' For me, intensity covers a lot of sins. If there's one characteristic all winners share, it's that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years, I've always looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn't mean loud or flamboyant. It's something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion."

Leaders with high passion reinforce in a different pattern. They focus on performance as well as behaviors. They view the potential for performance improvement as nearly infinite. No matter how remarkable the improvements made today, we are hardly scratching the surface of what is possible. That makes for a pretty exciting world, one worth pursuing. It also constitutes a competitive advantage over organizations whose leaders believe they have improved productivity as much as possible. You might hear a leader say, "We have made double digit productivity improvements for the past 5 years and we really can't expect any more from this area." Nonsense. The group may have reached a temporary plateau, but there are probably huge productivity gains - orders of magnitude - still available.

In our quality work, we did an exercise on breaking paradigms to illustrate this. We would have a group of 20-30 people form a circle. One person would throw a ball to another person across the circle, then, from that person to a third and so on, until everyone had caught the ball once. Everyone was to remember who was throwing him the ball and who would catch it next. After this "dry run," the group did it again. This time we would time how long it took the ball to touch everyone in the prescribed order. Generally it would take 30-45 seconds to complete the circuit.

At this point, we told the group they could make any changes they wanted and start over. The only condition was that the ball had to go from one person to another in the exact same order. We asked the group to predict the ultimate best time for the exercise. At this point estimates of best time would range from 15-25 seconds. No one ever guessed it could be done in less than 10 seconds.

We allowed the group to brainstorm ideas and repeat the process. A typical idea was to arrange everyone in order so the ball could go from one to another without traveling very far. That would knock at least 50% off the time. We let the group brainstorm more and kept repeating the process until they believed they had gone as far as possible. No group had a final result above 3 seconds. One group had a measured time of less than 0.1 second! They each extended their index finger and arranged the fingertips in a helix pattern so the ball would touch each finger in the right order as it was dropped instantly through the helix.

The productivity improvements seen in this example were orders of magnitude greater than the most optimistic estimates at the start. It showed that humans grossly underestimate the level of improvement opportunities.

Lean Manufacturing work has an activity called Kaizen, where a team will focus on a process for 4-5 days and normally improve productivity 25% to 50% in that single week. The same group can go back again to improve another double-digit percentage in another week. The level of improvement is nearly infinite, and it typically dwarfs any reasonable estimate made beforehand. Multiply the conventional wisdom of maximum potential improvement for any process by 10. That may approach the actual limit of improvement available.

This is why great leaders are passionate about improving performance. They know it is possible and are excited to make it reality.

Great leaders accomplish much in organizations through demonstration of three key attitudes. They are not afraid to model strength and courage, especially during the most difficult times. Their outlook is always positive and focused on the brass ring. Finally, they have a magical way of transmitting their personal passion throughout the organization.

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Article Tags: leadership, lean, Passion, performance, trust



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