Good morning,
I remember one time I got into a heated exchange with the analyst I trusted the most in my team. We were preparing for an upcoming job interview at the time of the argument. After reviewing the cover letter, resume, and our notes from the phone screen, we were preparing a final list of things we needed to learn about the candidate who was soon coming in. Our process was to first finalize this list of 'what we need to learn' before working together to craft questions targeted toward learning these details about the candidate.
As it had done occasionally in the past, the question of passion came up. Should we look for passion, should we seek an individual with passion, should we just ask outright why are you passionate for this job? And in the past I’d just said no, don’t ask about passion, and we’d always left it there. I’d gotten away without further explanation up until then, I think, because I usually gave clear reasoning for my other decisions. At this point, I'd earned my team's trust that if I made a quick decision without explaining, it was because there was simply no time to explain. But I guess I’d gone on long enough in this particular situation without explaining myself and my analyst rightfully decided it was time to demand an explanation for my thinking.
This, of course, was like ringing the bell before the heavyweight fight. I did not believe passion - passion - was important. In the team at the time, there were few people I would have described as passionate. The qualities that made them successful, I thought, had little to do with a burning desire (or lack thereof) to do any of the work we were responsible for - programming databases, analyzing data, and helping our auditors get the details right, all for the sake of improving healthcare.
My analyst disagreed. For him, without passion, there was no natural inertia toward improvement. Bringing in new hires with a drive to push themselves and the team was his most important goal for this hiring round.
We went back and forth on this for quite a long time. I will not go through a blow-by-blow account here, reader. The main point is the aftermath. In the process of airing our views, challenging each other, and defending our positions, we came to a unified midway point on the importance of passion at this stage of hiring.
Passion, we decided, was a baseline skill. It was important to care enough about the field, the company’s role, and the tools our team used to contribute to the organization. A candidate who did not have enough of it could not be allowed into the team. But this was a binary factor, merely a yes or no consideration. A candidate who boasted the quality in abundance was not a preferred candidate to someone who only had just enough passion to meet the baseline.
Instead of worrying about passion, we decided to worry about practice. Did the candidate try to get better at things? Did this practice happen outside the allotted time for learning, studying, or working? Did the candidate respond to an opportunity for improvement by putting in the all the time and effort required to get better? Practice, we thought, was a good way to measure the quality my analyst called passion without endangering us as a hiring team of being distracted by a candidate whose endless passion never quite translated into productive action.
This sounds silly to a degree. It even feels a little strange to write this down, years later, as a learning moment. I still wonder if I forced our team into a mistake. Isn’t passion the best thing a person could have? Maybe my analyst was right, maybe the best move would have been to simply ask – why are you passionate about this job? – and go with the first candidate whose response brought tears to my eyes.
However, I think the reason we went a different way holds up. Passion can be gamed. A candidate for any job could walk into the interview and recite a memorized script about how passionate he or she is about the given job. An inclination to practice is a little different. Describing how to practice is much tougher for people who never practice. Simply put, candidates who don't practice don't know how to talk about practice. The candidates who can relate experiences about practicing in exhaustive detail are not smooth-talking their way into a job because what they are talking about can only be learned through practice.
The idea of the passionate individual is, I think, a bit of a red herring. It is so obvious when someone has passion. The desire passionate people have to excel seems to bleed from their every pore. With someone who cares so much in the team, we think nothing could ever go wrong. But do we want the surgeon whose passion cannot be expressed in words or do we want the surgeon who puts in all the extra practice to master the craft? Do we want the fireman who cannot stand the very thought of a burning inferno or do we want the fireman who trained on aiming the hose until his arms were stiff and aching from exhaustion? It's possible that those who practice the most are also the most passionate, of course, but from my experience passion is hardly a strong predictor of who will practice.
Most successful people, I think, do not separate themselves from their competition because of their passion. They do so because they practice. The more I learn about these highest of performers, the less surprised I am to encounter stories about practice: the hours alone in the gym, the discipline to rise in the dark and start writing, the midnight oil burned away programming software. I’m sure their passionate competitors at home with their passionate feet up on the couch are thinking only of how much they want to succeed. These people might even want to succeed more than anyone else on the planet. But if they don't put in the practice, they're going to lose against someone who practiced, and it won't matter who cares more about the outcome.
The next time you are filling an open position, here is my humble suggestion: look for people who get better at things on their own time. I can’t claim to be an expert in the specifics of how to do this – it’s different for every job, I suspect – but figuring it out is probably your job, anyway.
Until next time, happy hiring.
Signed,
The Business Bro
