Does Your Team Have Passion?

(By Dick Kalt) How many times have you hired people for positions, thinking they’d do a great job, only to find that it’s not working out as well as you’d hoped or expected? Either they just didn’t get it together, didn’t get along with others, or simply didn’t deliver a good work product. So you sent them packing.

This can be counted as a bad investment on both ends: for you, because of the time spent training, and for the employee, in the missed opportunity for them to achieve the satisfaction they were seeking. Worse still, you put someone out on the street who knows your organization better than anyone at your competition, and guess what? That’s where they landed.

There is no way for you to definitively know that your next hire is going to be a superstar. You have to rely on their resume, interviews, and the recommendations of others who know them. These are all reasonable indicators, but you still don’t know for sure until you put the new hire to the test.

It should be a clear objective of yours to find the passion that lives inside every member of your staff. They may think they have it for what they’re doing when they start — after all, they need a job and you are offering one. People take positions hoping that they will like what they’re doing and who they’re working with. Both you and the new hire hope they’ll blossom into a superstar, beyond all expectations, increasing revenue and profitability for you, which in the long run, also benefits them.

But then they don’t.

It doesn’t matter what went wrong, what matters is what you do next. More times than not, the person you hire, regardless of their experience, is just doing their job. They want to do well and succeed, for their own pride and your praise. But often there is something missing in them: passion. Passion for what they’re doing. If you possess passion for what you do, curiosity for what you can become, you will be doing what you love and never “work” a day in your life.

So why is this important?

Simply because every person you hire is an investment, not an expense. In treating them as an expense, you’ll get what you pay for — in the best case. If you invest in them, taking the time to observe how they interact, asking how they feel about their responsibilities (note that I did not say “job”), and learning about their personal life, likes, dislikes, successes, and failures — really seeking to know and understand them — together you both can discover where their passion actually lies.

Never do an exit interview until you’ve considered other opportunities within your organization. I like to give an employee a chance to raise their hand and be considered for a new or different position.

Taking a poor performer and transitioning that person to an alternative set of responsibilities will often be less risky than starting from scratch and looking outside. It’s also more cost-effective. Rather, giving someone another chance to find their passion sends a very strong message about how you perceive the relationship, while also serving as the best motivator. Coincidentally, if you’re reducing staff, this can eliminate a layoff and severance while also eliminating a new hire.

I’m not saying this is always the most effective or the right choice to make in these types of situations. I can tell you that a number of our staff members are happier in their second and third assignments, doing a far superior job, providing more value, and having an even higher regard for the company. Oh, and yes, they already know what the company does, our values and processes. Now more than ever they have the passion to prove they are an integral part of this.

Make no mistake, terminating a person is its own hard decision, and sometimes it is the only decision to be made. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I’ve seen firsthand the payoff from those who were going to walk the plank, but are now among our best staffers.

Take the risk when you can, and you’ll reap the rewards.

Dick Kalt is the EVP of CRN International. He can be reached at 203.407.3339 or [email protected]