Monday 29 July 2019

The dream of every leader: Why and how to lead a passion-driven team

In an earlier blog, I wrote about why the best thing young people can do for themselves, their communities and the world in general is to follow, or better yet, develop a passion. Today, I want to turn my attention to discussing why and how leaders of businesses and organizations can lead passion driven teams.

  1. Es más dificil nadar contra el corriente. It’s is easier to swim with the currents than against them; so passion-driven leadership aims as much as possible to have team members swimming with their own unique currents, and this is fundamental to the achievement of powerful company and organizational results. In teams and organizations, leaders often rely on a few members of their team who bring a unique contribution to the team and on whose single performance they believe the best results of the team depends.
    However, as well as managing passionate employees, I believe leaders can actually develop and lead a passion driven team where, instead relying on one or two, every team member becomes a star bringing unique piece to contribute to the creation of a team achieving unbelievable results. Each member gets to engage in personally meaningful work and in what they enjoy doing while contributing their best to the achievement of the collective outcomes of the team.
  2.  Passion driven leadership is the best way to keep star employees and to nurture every team member to become stars and keep them committed to the team’s vision and goals over long periods of time. In previous post, I wrote about why one should build their passion and how this produces the best outcomes for themselves, those around them and the society. I also noted that one doesn’t even have to leave their current workplace in order to develop a passion. This is where passion-driven leadership comes in.
  3. A strategic advantage: with passion-driven leadership, it becomes harder for team members to leave and if and when they do, they continue to be an asset for the organization. In this perspective, passion-driven leadership takes the worry of losing highly performing team members away by focusing first and foremost on developing fulfilled employees who find personal meaning in the work they do and thus giving their best over long periods of time. A deep human tendency is the search for meaning and a sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves and not merely putting food on the table. While it’s true that salaries are important, it’s a well-known fact that beyond a threshold financial rewards serve a diminishing contribution to workplace performance.
  4. Passion-driven leadership relieves the leader from the position of chief discipline officer to a nurturer of individuals and relationships. Although most people in leadership hate to see themselves as this, the conventional idea of the leader is that of the severe and ever-ready-to-pounce boss. This leaves leaders in constant stress and detached from the people on whose commitment and performance their own success as leaders depend.

Here are some ways to develop a passion-driven team:

  • How 1: Develop a passion-driven leadership infrastructure throughout your organization, especially true for people leading multiple teams. While everyone has capacity to become a passion-driven leader, especially in the early stages, it is best to identify members of your team who themselves have found a sense of purpose with their work and who are not fearful of developing other leaders. Once identified, strategically place these members across teams where they can lead passion-driven micro teams.
  • How 2: Be attentive to the activities, both work and non-work, that excite each member of your team. Also, observe which tasks and opportunities they naturally gravitate towards and which tasks they dread and always turn in late. Nudge them in the direction of those activities. Using personality profiling tests such as this one based on Carl Jung’s and Isabel Briggs Myers’ personality type theory is one of the best I have seen for doing this for workplace, just make sure team members write what comes to mind first. Find it here: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp  
  • How 3: People’s strengths are tied to their core weaknesses. There are two solutions to this; one is to pair people up with others that complement their weaknesses and second is to give team members ample opportunities to develop their areas of weakness and stretch out of their comfort zones.
  • How 4: Observe team dynamics and work to fill in any skill gaps with new team members. Sometimes, after aligning everyone in your team to the roles and responsibilities they are best suited for, you may find empty space in the team. You may look within the team to see who, with some push and opportunities can fill that role, but sometimes the best thing is to recruit a new member into the team. Just ensure the hiring process is oriented towards shedding light on whether or not someone can fill this role; role-based hiring processes and probation periods are an excellent way to do this.

Finally, apart from the above suggestions, it is important for one to perform a regular diagnosis of their team, both personally as a leader, but also with the whole team where the perform a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis and execute the necessary action to move the team and individual members forward.  

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