The Passionate People Problem: Balancing Passion Against the Realities of the Job

LIKE SO MANY things in life, the Harvard Business Review isn’t what it used to be.

I’m not sure why, but the cutting-edge stories about the world of business that HBR used to be known for seem to be more infrequent these days.

If you pinned me down I wouldn’t be able to give you a good reason why, but I just don’t see enough HBR stories that jump out and make me want to read them anymore.

It may be because they have too many articles with too many authors. There was one last week (4 Ways to Meaningfully Support New Mothers Returning to Work) that had seven — yes, 7 !! — authors.

I’ve never seen seven names in a byline for a single story before, and all I can say is that just like too many cooks spoil the broth, too many authors can make a story completely unreadable.

But just when I’m ready to cancel my subscription — again — HBR goes off and publishes something that grabs me and makes me want to read it.

Is passion the key to workplace success?

The story? It’s titled How Passion Can Backfire at Work, and it checks in with a modest, by Harvard Business Review standards, five (5) authors in the byline.

The summary of the story is pretty interesting:

“Passion has long been championed as a key to workplace success. However, scientific studies have found mixed results: On the one hand, some studies find evidence that passionate employees tend to perform better, while other research has documented null or even negative effects on performance. What’s the root of these inconsistent findings surrounding passion? And how can we reap the benefits of passion without falling prey to its downsides?

Through a series of studies with more than 1,000 employees from the U.S. and China, researchers shed light on these questions by showing that passion is associated with overconfidence in our own performance. Although this passion-driven overconfidence is not necessarily harmful — and in certain contexts, it may even be helpful — their findings suggest that managers should take steps to mitigate the potential negative consequences of the overconfidence that may go hand in hand with passion.”

What resonated with me was the line that said “feeling passion doesn’t (always) lead people to perform better.” You should dig into the article to see the findings and analysis, but I was interested in getting greater insight into how I might have dealt better with the passionate employees I supervised over the years.

The need for more realistic expectations

PASSIONATE EMPLOYEES ARE pretty easy to hire because their passionate nature usually comes out during the hiring process. I can remember one lady I interviewed when I was a newspaper editor who told me that she wanted to work at a place with “unbelievably high standards.” Who wouldn’t want to hire someone like that?

Well, I hired her … and guess what? Her passion for “unbelievably high standards” meant she was constantly complaining.  Her gripes? “Why don’t we have more staff so we can do better work?” and “our deadlines are so early that we can’t do our best work.”

She did good work, but her never-ending complaints about things none of us could control made me wonder if people with “unbelievably high standards” are completely detached from reality and the workplace limitations people struggle with everywhere?

The HBR story gets into this somewhat, particularly the “the overconfidence that so often accompanies passion.” They describe it like this:

“More passionate employees may be less open to negative feedback and more resistant to objective information about their performance, as their rose-colored glasses may inflate their perceptions of their performance and make it harder for them to set realistic expectations.

As such, it may be especially important for managers of passionate employees to help them set more realistic expectations for themselves, and to provide feedback regularly to help them develop better self-awareness.”

When passion on the job really does backfire

HERE’S MY TAKE: Helping passionate employees to “set more realistic expectations for themselves” sounds like good advice, but my experience is that the problem with passionate people is that they simply won’t balance their passion against the daily realities of the job.

I’ve managed many passionate people in my career, and I remember them well because they not only had unrealistic expectations, but they also couldn’t bend their passionate nature to the pragmatic realities we all face at work.

Most of them were simply unable to meet deadlines, stay within budgets, or flex when the situation called for it. They couldn’t compromise on their passions or buy into the fact that with most jobs, the goal is to do the best you can within the constraints you have to work under.

The shortcomings with the analysis that the five authors of How Passion Can Backfire at Work offer up is that it’s vague and fails to account for the pragmatic realities of the workplace. They simply say that “it (is) especially important for managers of passionate employees to help them set more realistic expectations for themselves, and to provide feedback regularly to help them develop better self-awareness.”

That kind of advice falls under the heading easier said than done. It seems to be coming from researchers and academics who don’t have the foggiest idea of how to manage people on the job, and their closing statement seems to bear this out:

“At the end of the day, passion has a lot to offer, but it can also come at a cost. Our research doesn’t suggest that organizations shouldn’t hire passionate people, or even that managing them is inherently harder. It just shows that managing passionate people requires proactivity and vigilance.”

The challenge in handling passionate people

MANAGING PEOPLE, whether they are overtly passionate or not, ALWAYS requires “proactivity and vigilance” as well as a bunch of other things. And I disagree with the notion that managing passionate people is NOT inherently harder — because it is.

The lesson I learned about hiring passionate people is that they frequently are unable to abide by the pragmatic mindset one needs to be flexible on the job. The bigger managerial question to ponder is this: can you deal with the never-ending demands and complaints passionate people often have when they run into the realities of the job?

Passionate people can often be a great addition to the workforce, but with passion comes the need to closely manage and work with them when their passions don’t square with the constraints of the workplace.

It takes a really good manager to do that.

Too bad the Harvard Business Review editors didn’t kick How Passion Can Backfire at Work back to one or more of the five authors to explain what to do when passion DOES backfire at work. It just goes to show that no matter how many authors are involved, it only takes one good editor to demand that one of the writers answer that kind of question.

It’s the kind of thing the old HBR used to do regularly … and why I have a hard time subscribing to a publication that doesn’t seem to do so as much today.

Other trends and insights 

And your latest dose of AI news … 

• Can AI Help Your Company Innovate? It Depends (From HBR.org)
• College education may not be preparing employees for generative AI (From HRDive.com)
• Gen AI Is Coming for Remote Workers First (From HBR.org)
• Companies reduce ambitions with AI models (From WSJ.com)
• A day after raising $500 million, AI startup Cohere told staff it was laying off about 20 employees (From Fortune.com)
• Meta launches biggest AI model ever (From AItoolreport.com)
• A year in: Nestlé employees save 45 minutes per week using internal generative AI (From Worklife.news)

ALSO: I was never big on office birthday parties, and that’s one of the things that started to fade away with the rise of remote and hybrid work. But they’re not going away completely, and as The Wall Street Journal notes in Say Goodbye to the Office Birthday Party (Thank Goodness), “Many workers hated the ‘Happy Birthday’ ritual. Now a lot of companies are redefining the celebrations to make them less annoying.”

ALSO -ALSO… Summer Olympics story of the Week: Leave it The Wall Street Journal to have a story that most everybody probably suspected but now has finally been acknowledged in The Dirty Secret of Olympic Swimming: Everyone Pees in the Pool. It makes clear that, “If you thought the Olympics was the culmination of four years of blood, sweat and tears, we regret to inform you that La Défense Arena in Paris will be overflowing with a different bodily fluid. It turns out that every athlete who takes a plunge into the Olympic pool will probably relieve themselves in there, too.”

Management insight of the week

“I have been a ‘Star Wars’ fan from the beginning, and have long admired the ability of Han Solo to get himself and his friends out of jams that often seem hopeless (except for maybe that carbonite incident). I never stopped to think about how the ‘Star Wars’ gang might function in an office, but Kristen Hendrix did!

She outlines the roles that each of them plays. Princess Leia is the strong leader ready to do what’s necessary to save her people. Luke Skywalker is the ‘newbie,’ eager to be of service but still in need of guidance and support from those with more experience. Chewbacca has decades of experience and he’s not interested in the limelight. Instead, he’s the calm and steady team member who always has your back.

Han, though, always seems to be itching for a fight, which can often start the fires that he then must put out, with or without support. In the office, such recklessness can wreak havoc unless you build a culture that provides ways for the ‘Hans’ also to become a team player while still lending their top-notch problem-solving skills. Such opportunities can lead to fewer crises.

As Hendrix puts it: ‘Consider what we’re rewarding and celebrating. The cowboy mentality, or someone that will help us improve so there are fewer fires to put out? Help decrease the moments when someone needs to save the day.’ “

— Candace Chellew, in the July 26 SmartBrief on Leadership newsletter

Dear Readers: I’ve been compiling this weekly wrap-up for over 20 years — from Workforce.com to TLNT.com to Fuel50 and then here at The Skeptical Guy. I’d love to know what you think, so email comments to me at johnhollon@yahoo.com or johnhollon@theskepticalguy.com.