Increasingly these days private and even public sector
employers want their staff to be passionate about their jobs. Being passionate
about the environment is great if you work for Greenpeace or the Environment
Protection Agency; being passionate about animals is handy if you work for the
RSPCA; being passionate about ensuring excellent service for the customer is
great if you work in Maccas (though I haven’t seen that in evidence much lately).
Unfortunately we can’t all get jobs in areas that we’re
passionate about (especially if we’re passionate about Starfleet). I worry (but
not overly much) about how many people who are passionate about X there are in the
workforce. Not, I suspect, enough to fill all the roles in industry X. This
means unless they want a lot of empty work-stations, organisations are going to
have to employ folk who aren’t as passionate about their widgets as that
organisation might want.
In that case the organisation needs to do stuff to make
people passionate about being there. A good starting place is to have managers
and leaders who can – by their knowledge, expertise, empathy, vision and
communication skills – engage employees who are ‘not particularly passionate’
and rally them to the organisational cause.
So, big organisation, next time you say you want passionate
people working for you, maybe make sure it’s not just lip service to the latest
recruitment buzz word and that you’ve done the groundwork to inspire that
desired for passion.
