Small Business Makeovers

Many years ago Janet was working in a job she hated. Her office was filled with recruiters making tens of thousands of dollars every month. Each time a placement was made for another disk drive engineer, the bell would ring in the office. But it never rang for Janet.

One day she saw a poster for a success seminar. Something about it struck a chord.

Sitting up front at the seminar she listened as a beautiful, articulate woman spoke about how easy it can be to enjoy success. The speaker said you just have to find those things that light you up inside, your passions.

As Janet listened to this remarkable woman, she felt a growing excitement inside. This was it! This was her passion, her purpose in life, to be a speaker like this amazing woman.

The next day when a friend casually asked her how she was doing. Janet answered with excitement, “I’ve found my calling! I’m going to be a speaker.”

Knowing this was her destiny; Janet left her job at the recruiting company. She travelled across the country attending each of her new mentor’s seminars and was finally hired by the woman, Debra Poneman. Today, Janet and Debra are best friends, and she’s living her passion of being a speaker and transformational leader.

Along this long and winding road she learned there is one key secret to living a happy, fulfilling, rewarding life:

“Whenever you are faced with a choice, a decision or an opportunity,
choose in favor of your passions.”

There are two parts to this. First, you have to know what you are passionate about, what it is that matters most to you in your life. That’s why Janet and her business partner, Chris Attwood wrote The Passion Test – The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Destiny. The Passion Test is a simple, yet powerful way to clarify your top passions in life.

The second part is to choose in favor of those passions. When you do this consistently with every significant decision, you will be guaranteed a passionate life.

Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson and Jerry Porras wrote a fabulous book called Success Built to Last – Creating a Life That Matters. They interviewed over 300 people who have enjoyed enduring success for more than twenty years. People like former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Senator John McCain, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Lance Armstrong and many others.

All of these very successful people had one important characteristic in common: when faced with a major decision in their life, they always made their choice based on what held deep meaning for them. This is what we mean by choosing in favor of your passions.

Sometimes, when you listen to all the advice that’s available about what is necessary to create a happy, fulfilling, successful life, it can be a bit overwhelming. When you boil it down, if you are able to do nothing else, clarify your passions and then choose in favor of them, and you will discover your life unfolding in exciting, new, unexpected ways.

Now the principles of The Passion Test have been adopted by leading edge companies. These companies have found tremendous value in helping employees discover their own work passions and core passions and then aligning job roles with these passions. As people do work that is meaningful to them as individuals and that is aligned with the organization’s core passions, employee engagement, productivity and profitability skyrockets. That’s the link between people, passion and profit.

According to a 2005 Harris Interactive Survey only 20% of respondents feel very passionate about their jobs, while 33% believe they have reached a dead end in their career and 21% are eager to change careers.

Based on research, there are a number of benefits to be gained from increasing employee engagement. The correlation between passionate, engaged employees, happy customers and profitability is strong.
Passionate, engaged employees have been shown to have a strong, positive effect on customer engagement. The research has shown that engaged employees grow in their ability to positively affect customers.
Overall, most companies have three kinds of employees :

1. Passionate and engaged – Employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the company forward and creates at least $32,000 per year in additional revenue for the company.
2. Not engaged – Employees are essentially “checked out.” They are primarily at work for the pay cheque and they only do what they have to in order to get by.
3. Actively disengaged – Employees who aren’t just unhappy at work; they are actively acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine what they’re engaged workers accomplish. Disengaged employees cost their companies about $16,000 per year.

In average companies, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is 1.5:1. In world-class companies, the ratio is 8:1. Our intent is to help our clients get to at least the 8:1 level.

What Can be Done?

Using an innovative model called “The Passion Test for Business” can help management to:

• Clarify the company’s unique value proposition that your clients pay you for.
• Identify the things that matter most for the company to deliver that value. We call these the company’s passions. This is about what you do to deliver your unique value to clients and customers.
• Help employees identify their own top five work-related passions. These are things that matter most to them in their life at work. We also help employees identify their core passions, which means “why” they consider their top five work passions to be so important to them.

The idea is that when you match employees’ passions with job roles that reflect the company’s need to deliver it’s unique value to it’s clients, you create the opportunity for employees to be fully engaged in delivering that value.

Workplace Application

For successful talent management and succession planning, including meaning and passion in the formula for long-term success is the basis for identifying and culturing tomorrow’s leaders. Passionate employees are more engaged. If employers can identify the core passions of their people then jobs and career paths can be planned that align the individual’s core passions with the needs of the organization.

Are you looking for ways to improve your organization’s performance? Leading edge companies now realize that employee engagement can be a huge competitive advantage. Contact Geoff Affleck to schedule an assessment of your organization and see if you can benefit from this innovative approach.