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Passion

Culture – Involvement: Capability Development

by Ron Potter November 14, 2019

When I see low scores in the area of Capability Development, they seem to be driven by a couple of issues:

Leadership View

The leader and corporation almost always feel like they’re providing a great deal of training, education, and skill development opportunities and therefore don’t understand why the employees give them low scores in this area.

Employee View

Yes, the corporation gives lots of “training” but always where the corporation wants them to develop, not in the area where they want to grow.

Corporations often:

bring in trainers for the day
provide seminars
even provide opportunities to go off-site to one of these training sessions, seminars, or continuing education.

BUT, all of this capability development happens in the area where the company wants the employee to improve. And it’s directed at improving the employee in the area where the corporation has them positioned.

One person said to me “I’m grateful to the company for providing me education and skills that have moved me to the top of the accounting department. It provides me a great salary. BUT, even though that’s an area where I have skills, that’s not the area where I have a passion. I would much rather learn about and have an opportunity in the marketing area”.

I worked with Dr. Cloraire Rapaille for a few years. He wrote a great book titled The Culture Code. One of the Corporate Studies that Dr. Rapaille did for several major corporations was to help answer the question of what motivates people in the corporate world. I believe it was in that corporate study where Dr. Rapaille coined the team “Future Potential Self.” He discovered that people are not motivated by money, public recognition, or other forms of corporate motivational efforts. People are motivated by what helps them get to what they see as their future potential self.

In my story above, the person’s “future potential self” was in marketing, not accounting.

Future Potential Self

So what does it take to provide training for a person’s Future Potential Self?

As a leader, you need to know what the Future Potential Self of your team members! It requires that the leader get to know their team members on a human level. Not just knowing their skill level. Not just knowing their competencies. But knowing who they are as a person.

One of my clients told me a story about putting in some long-hard hours on a particular project and yet felt very rewarded by their boss when the project was over. When I asked what made them feel that way, they told me that their boss bought them the exact guitar they had been dreaming about.

Was it expensive? It was very nice quality, but it was not considered a really expensive high-end guitar.

So what made it so special for them?

My boss knew that I loved playing in the church praise band.
My boss knew that any extra money we had right now went to caring for our new baby.
My boss was listening enough to know exactly which guitar I was desiring.

In short, their boss knew them as a human being!

That’s capability development. Yes, they provided training courses to help them get better at their job. Yes, they were offered off-site education to help improve their skills. But, when added to the fact that their boss knew what they were desiring personally, that’s what improved the scores in Capability Development.

Know your people! It makes everything else more valuable.

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Passionately-Focused Leaders

by Ron Potter June 4, 2018

Staying focused is virtually impossible without passion. Passion is a craving deep within us, that yearning for something we feel we just must have. It surfaces in a multitude of ways. For example, consider the story of Patrick (Pádraic) Henry Pearse.

Headmaster at St. Edna’s, a small private college south of Dublin, Pearse’s passion was Ireland’s heritage, something he feared was being destroyed by the domination of the English.

Pearse was by nature a gentle man who could never harm even the smallest creature. He had spent his life helping his students understand and pursue their own big dreams. Pearse certainly was not considered a militant or a revolutionary. Yet he was driven by his passion for Ireland.

No longer able to watch the nation’s language, culture, and history eroding, he felt it was time “to pursue his own great goals that, in his words, ‘were dreamed in the heart and that only the heart could hold.’ ”⁴

He embraced the cause to reclaim Ireland and within a year was a leader of the Easter Rising, the Irish rebellion of 1916. After days of intense fighting, the British army defeated the revolutionaries, and on May 3, 1916, Pearse and others were executed in a jail in Dublin. The British leaders mistakenly thought this would put an end to the rebellion. But they did not understand the power of a person’s passion, as people across Ireland embraced Pearse’s ideas for saving Ireland and dreaming big dreams.

In 1921, Ireland declared freedom from England, and Pearse’s passion and dreams for the Irish culture came to fruition. Pádraic Henry Pearse’s passion ultimately forced a nation to find itself.

Finding our passion includes dreaming big. Ask yourself some questions:

What is my burning passion?
What work do I find absorbing, involving, engrossing?
What mission in life absolutely absorbs me?
What is my distinctive skill?

Answers to questions like these will point you to your passion.

A friend of mine, the late Leonard Shatzkin, had a passion for mathematics that helped him become a pioneer in understanding the technicalities of inventory management. He developed a model of inventory control using linear regression that proved to be revolutionary for two companies he headed. But his passion didn’t just stop with benefits for his own organizations. Leonard then devoted the rest of his professional career to telling anyone who would listen about maximizing return on investment and minimizing overstocks.

That’s what passion is like; one way or another it demands expression. Even after his death, the effects of Leonard’s passion live on. His ideas and systems serve many individuals and organizations well.

Too often we allow old habits, the rigors of everyday life, and our ongoing fears or frustrations to impede our passion. We are cautioned by friends: “Don’t be so idealistic.” “Don’t be so daring.” “What if you fail?” These kinds of comments can shrink our passion so that we settle for working in fields away from our passion. We abandon it, we make do, and we play it safe.

Just as a mighty river needs a channel, passion needs a channel and a goal. Without such restraint, the result is a flood, a natural disaster. You need to make certain that you control your passion, not the other way around.

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2 Qualities of Highly Developed Focus

by Ron Potter September 7, 2015

I have found that two personal qualities combine optimally to create a leader of highly developed focus: passion and achievement. These form the boundaries of focus.

Passionately-Focused Leaders

Staying focused is virtually impossible without passion. So how do you identify and capitalize on your passion in the leadership setting?

Passion is a craving deep within us, that yearning for something we feel we just must have. It surfaces in a multitude of ways.

Finding our passion includes dreaming big. Ask yourself some questions:

What is my burning passion?
What work do I find absorbing, involving, engrossing?
What mission in life absolutely absorbs me?
What is my distinctive skill?

Answers to questions like these will point you to your passion.

A friend of ours, the late Leonard Shatzkin, had a passion for mathematics that helped him become a pioneer in understanding the technicalities of inventory management. He developed a model of inventory control using linear regression that proved to be revolutionary for two companies he headed. But his passion didn’t just stop with benefits for his own organizations. Leonard then devoted the rest of his professional career to telling anyone who would listen about maximizing return on investment and minimizing overstocks.

Just as a mighty river needs a channel, passion needs a channel and a goal. Without such restraint, the result is a flood, a natural disaster. You need to make certain that you control your passion, not the other way around.

Properly focused passion changes us for the better and often helps shape organizations, even nations. So dream big. Identify what motivates you to get up in the morning. Discover where you can make a difference, based on what “floats your boat.” Some people spend their lives looking at the flyspecks on the windshield of life. Dreaming big and fulfilling your passion help you look past the flyspecks to the beautiful world on your horizon.

Achievement-Motivated Leaders

Along with passion, a desire to achieve motivates a leader to a higher level of focus.

I have concluded that leaders with an achievement-motivated style (balanced by humility) have the most constructive approach to work. Typically, they do not waste time on projects or matters outside their vision. They determine what is important, that “something great,” and they seek to achieve it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” Every January millions of people watch the Super Bowl. During the awards ceremony after the game, we see players with big smiles. What are they shouting about? Not about money or fame, but about the ring. Each player on the winning team gets a championship ring—a symbol of reaching the pinnacle of the sport. Nothing else compares to having that ring. It is proof of the ultimate achievement in football. That’s what motivates an achievement-oriented person.

Achievement-motivated people need feedback. They seek situations in which they get concrete feedback that they define as job-relevant. In other words, they want to know the score.

People with a high need for achievement get ahead because, as individuals, they are producers. They get things done.

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