|
Find Your Passion |
March 16, 2005 |
Organizations can use the "Pursuit of Passionate Purpose" approach
to positively impact the bottom-line and reach other goals. Lynda
Simmons used such a process to build the largest non-profit housing
developer in the U.S., Phipps Houses. Tom Chappell, CEO of Tom's of
Maine, and others applied this approach to building entrepreneurial
ventures that blossomed into multimillion-dollar firms. Don
Vanlandingham did likewise to build a 500 million-dollar for-profit
technology company, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
"Ball Aerospace combines exciting, meaningful work with people's
passions. Our unique culture revolves around the people, outstanding and
very smart people, who do things that never have been done before. A lot
of our people would work if you didn't pay them - they love what they're
doing. People appreciate our values of integrity and professional
freedom. Being totally successful is the standard."
Indeed, the corporate culture does make a difference. Research from the
"Pursuit of Passionate Purpose" study indicates:
• People are the most critical element in an organization's success. The
work of the organization is a function of the work of the individuals
and teams. Each person is following, knowingly or unknowingly, the
four-stage process and determining: What do I value and find exciting,
what do I want, how do I get it, and how are things going?
• Organizations that accomplish extraordinary results know how to unleash
and match people's fervor with important organizational purposes. The
manager's job is to place people in positions that allow them to work
their passions, individually and in teams, in line with meaningful work
purposes.
• An organization follows a comparable four-stage process: Know the
organization (determining what are the values and core competencies -
the passion of the organization); Find passionate purpose (discerning
what needs in the marketplace to serve with the passion); Pursue purpose
(establishing and implementing a plan for how to achieve the mission);
and Assess and adjust along the way (asking how are things going and
what's next).
• Managers may find the following approaches helpful: Allow opportunities
for personal exploration so that people get to know themselves better;
consider company-paid education and training, job rotations and varying
project assignments; use the feedback loop to build employee's
self-confidence and strengthen a sense of meaningfulness by giving
people choice where possible and provide validation of competency and
progress through informal and formal assessments.
Excerpted from Pursuit of Passionate Purpose: Success Strategies for a
Rewarding Personal and Business Life, (c) 2005 by Theresa M. Szczurek,
Ph.D (Wiley).
If you have questions or comments about this story, send them to hreletters@lrp.com.
|
