One of Dave, and the Crestcom system's favorite faculty members - Mark Sanborn - author of the New York Times best seller “The Fred Factor - How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary” - provides our introduction to passion in the workplace.  

Mark suggests that there are four sources of passion - what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and who you do it for.  Each job and each employee have an opportunity to find and demonstrate passion in the workplace, around one of these four areas.  One of his examples was his job as a public speaker - he very much enjoys what he does in meeting with people and presenting information.  

He doesn’t feel a lot of passion around all the travel, hotel and restaurants he must frequent as part of his job.  So if he based his passion solely upon what he does, there would be significant amounts of time where he is not passionate about his work.  In these cases, you can find other sources of passion about your role, such as who you do it for, that will make the travel, hotels and restaurants at least bearable!

Most of us have encountered someone in a service role that brings great passion to their work.  Haven’t those people left a very positive impression on you, as a customer?

Just having passion, however, isn’t enough to produce a great performance.  You must have the skills and execution to create a memorable performance.  As leaders, it’s important to identify the skills necessary, and help employees develop those skills so they can be peak performers.  This can be very challenging!  Listen in to learn more about how to define great performance for your staff, and help them achieve that level of performance for your organization.

To learn more about how to bring passion and performance to your team, listen to this segment on Michigan Business Network.