Passion provides powerful motivation for learning, yet our 2017 survey of U.S. workers found just 13% of all employees exhibiting the type of passion in their work environments that helps them truly improve in their professions. How do we create learning environments that inspire passion — and how do we scale them to work in even the largest institutions?
At the Deloitte Center for the Edge we have identified three attributes of people who have a particular form of passion – the passion of the explorer – which is associated with performance improvement. They have:
- A long-term commitment to increasing one’s impact in a particular domain — for example, banking, medicine, gardening, or visual art.
- A questing disposition that seeks out new challenges and views them as exciting opportunities to learn.
- A connecting disposition that actively seeks connections with others who could help address these challenges.
This kind of passion is quite rare in today’s business world. And yet, our research indicated that more than 50% of workers have at least one of these attribute of passion to build on. What’s more, in our research we found 75 companies that had made changes to the work environment to help accelerate learning. We found that two critical work environment design principles in particular helped employees cultivate passion: creating systems for experimentation and supporting connection among workers.
The first way to support passion is to build systems for experimentation that help learners discover their particular domains. In our research we saw this happen through a combination of processes, tools, and management practices that were designed to compress cycle times and reduce the risk of failure. Often this included shared physical and virtual spaces for teams, prototyping and feedback tools, and management support.
The second way to support passion, was in creating connections between workers. Passionate employees are wired to seek out others who can help them meet their goals. In our research, companies that were successfully supporting passionate exploration made it easy for those employees to find others with relevant expertise, both within and outside the organization. This helped people solve problems more effectively and support future collaboration. Motley Fool, for example, employs a chief collaboration officer, whose sole job is to encourage active collaboration. Its internal social network helps employees find others with specific areas of expertise; it even recommends connections with people with similar passions, skills, experience, or interests.
Not every company is going to take these steps, but there are two more things managers can do to help employees apply passion at the workgroup level:
First, frame a powerful question. Exclusive focus on day-to-day challenges can lead people to miss larger shifts in the business ecosystem. Developing a sense of purpose — coming together to ask and answer a powerful question — can help a workgroup move beyond incremental efforts and inspire individual passion. To develop a powerful question, use open-ended prompts, such as “is this what we should be doing” and “what else is possible,” that encourage creative thinking and inspire new and novel approaches.
Then, prioritize performance trajectory. Just establishing a desired outcome doesn’t put a workgroup on track to reach it —and it’s all too easy to get distracted by incremental gains along the way. Instead, set high-impact performance objectives and track their trajectory, then make tradeoffs to accelerate movement toward shared outcomes. Encouraging long-term thinking outside the executive suite can also inspire workers to raise their aspirations and focus on what matters, deepening long-term commitment
There’s an untapped opportunity to cultivate passion in the workforce. People with the passion of the explorer are motivated to learn faster and that can play a significant role in accelerating performance improvement. Taking specific steps to cultivate passion is rewarding for both employees and companies.