The four items defining what you do and the 13 items detailing where you do it come straight from the two consulting firms. I suggest you could do a good measure of engagement using them. Typically Gallup uses its 12-question survey, and Hewitt uses more questions, based on tailoring to each client.
Who You Are
I'm speculating about the three items in who you are. Maybe there are more involved, but this is a good place to start. These are three of the "Big Five" personality factors that psychologists recently uncovered.
The "Big Five" represent a factor analysis of traits derived from the best-known and most valid personality tests used over the last 50 years or so. As more sophisticated statistical techniques became available in the 1990's, psychologists wanted to know which groups of traits would emerge if rigorous statistical procedures were applied over many tests and models. A factor is a group of related traits. These five emerged from careful "meta-analyses."
This is not a theory of how personality is formed, like psychoanalysis or behaviorism. Instead the big five are based on the view that people have stable, characteristic traits. Traits are clusters of attitudes, behaviors and feelings that are consistent over situations and time. At least 450 individual traits have been identified. Psychologists have constructed famous personality models using as few as three factors of related traits and as many as 16.
These five factors appear to be the "universals" of personality. This analysis also was done in several other countries and cultures and seems to stand up pretty well. The five are:
• Extraversion vs. Introversion
• Conscientiousness vs. Undirectedness
• Agreeableness vs. Antagonism
• Neuroticism vs. Emotional Stability, and
• Openness vs. Closed to Experience
Extraversion refers to your drive to be active with other people. Extroverted people love social situations. Obviously it's opposite is introversion, and those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggs inventory will know this as one of the four types. Conscientiousness is your achievement drive to produce results and accomplish things. You'll delay instant gratification to reach for more meaningful goals. Agreeableness is more than sociability. It's your capacity to experience and express feelings, to bond with a group and express trust, and to create intimacy with others. Neuroticism refers to your level of emotional stability are you well adjusted and able to cope with life's problems, or are you frequently anxious, hostile or sad? Do these feelings derail you from your goals? Openness is your motive to experience new things, people and situations. It signals curiosity. This trait appears to be the least reliable from a statistical perspective. It doesn't hold up as well under testing. Psychologists think openness is closely related to other factors, like extraversion and agreeableness and also includes a fair amount of intellect. The higher your intellectual curiosity, the more openness you show. This bothers trait researchers who think intellectual capacity is different than personality.
So why did I list conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness as a part of passion, and not extraversion and neuroticism? Here's my reasoning. If you disagree, please let me know.
Conscientiousness seems to me to be the essence of passion for work to stay focused on your tasks and be productive over the long term. I suspect you need conscientiousness for passion at anything, including romance. Passion for work also requires you to experience joy while you work. Agreeableness includes the capacity to have, recognize and express these strong positive feelings. In other personality models, agreeableness is likened to love. Finally I think you have to be high on openness, the drive to go where the road takes you, to gain the fullest possibilities from your work. This, too, will feed your passion.
I eliminated extraversion because you can be passionate whether you're extraverted or introverted-we all know passionate introverts. All of these traits are dimensions, and if passion for work doesn't load high on one side of the dimension (i.e. openness vs. closed), the factor can't be considered.
Finally, I'm uncertain about neuroticism. I can argue that you have to be stable (non-neurotic) to pursue your passion for work. On the other hand, I could also argue that some neurotic single-mindedness is part of passion for work. However, a lot of neuroticism may mean you are too easily distracted to bear down, get something done and love it over a long period of time. At the same time, we all can think of artists who appear highly passionate about what they do and downright crazy-Van Gogh comes to mind immediately. So where does that leave us? I think passionate people in organizations who have to work with others need a high level of stability with just a touch of neuroticism. Maybe the mix is 75/25? Since this factor might be different for different jobs or careers I eliminated it.
How To Build Passion
This discussion naturally raises the question of how you can increase passion. If you believe passionate employees should create phenomenal results for themselves and their companies, then you need to cultivate this.
Several things to do come to mind:
1. Pick the right people-Look for these things:
• A match between personal values and your company's values and culture
• A match with the skills, knowledge and abilities needed for the role or job you're trying to fill
• A match with the three personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness
This may sound simple, but since most companies usually only look for one of these things-the right set of skills, knowledge and abilitiesóexpanding your selection techniques to fit all three won't be easy. This also suggests using some form of personality testing to get the right person, and many places are reluctant to do this. Since I started my career 25+ years ago as an assessment psychologist, I think there can be great value in personality testing.
2. Improve people management skills. From the list in the table, you can see how important the boss is in determining how engaged people are. Many of the what you do and where you do it items are boss-driven. In the best companies, managers and leaders are relationship driven. They get results with people, not at their expense.
A crucial way to do this is to create stronger accountability about managing and developing people. Just donít talk about it, demand that managers do it, role model it, measure it and promote/demote/transfer managers based on their performance at doing it. The only real difference between companies that are good at people management and companies that arenít is how seriously they take it and how many resources, especially time, they put to it.
3. Keep improving your workplace practices. You can always get better. Review the list above. Work on everything that needs it--from making sure people know whatís expected of them to strong recognition/reward processes.
As I wrote last month, recognize that no program or process will be equally meaningful to everyone. Weíre all different people with different needs-even if you start doing a better job of selecting for conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness. Be strategic about how you allocate your resources. Listen to your people about what they really need to become more engaged or passionate about their work and your company and spend your attention and funds there.
4. Create a friendly, joyful work environment. From the passion items in the table above, you can see how essential happy work relationships are to many people (ok, maybe not as important for introverts). Spend time building an environment where people know that collaboration and mutual help are expected and reciprocated. Then go beyond that to promote purely social interactions so friendships can form.
One thing we know from studying the values of baby boomers is they prefer a more casual workplace. Gen Xers and Gen Yers go past that and want to have fun at work. You can inspire passion by playing to these values.
Engagement-passion is going to emerge as an even stronger workplace issue in the next few years. It will become a huge part of getting, growing and keeping talent. Some of this will come from generational values as Gens X and Y take over from boomers, some from our post 9/11 need for greater meaning in our more dangerous world and some from the talent shortage that will reappear soon, probably by late 2003. Getting to this now while business is just recovering may feel like a luxury, but think of the advantage youíll have when itís the next big thing.
From a different world, Neil Young even sings about this in his post 9/11 album, appropriately titled, Are You Passionate?
Are you passionate?
Are you livin' like you talk?
Are you dreamin' now
that you're goin' to the top?
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