Passionate, meaning capable of being roused to intense feeling, ardent, easily aroused to anger, is a word which is taken for granted now in organisations to convey commitment to the job, or being able to go the extra mile. Despite the ubiquity of the term over many years, it seems that we have not yet reached peak passion. Previously the word also had connotations of suffering or enduring. Hence the passion of Christ refers to Jesus’ suffering on the cross. To be passionate about one’s job, then, denotes hard work, endurance, and a willingness to suffer in order complete work which pushes the employee to their limit. In a way, then, to claim to be passionate is also an indication of submission and obedience to a call of duty.
The prevalence of the term is at odds with the experience of many workers in organisations where metrics and performance management are used as a disciplinary apparatus to keep people’s noses to the grindstone. Ticking boxes, conforming to increased standardisation and targets often squeezes out worker autonomy and a sense that it is possible to exercise professional judgement. And yet while this narrowing of professional enjoyment is happening, employees are expected at the same time to be able to assert that they feel passionate about their jobs. Perhaps the greater the presence of the former the more the latter is required as public display.
The inquiry into an employee’s commitments and passions seems to have become a particularly important interview question for companies, judging by the number of internet guides there are to answering the passion question. Often, when I work with groups of managers it is usually only a matter of minutes before someone in the group responds to a particular dilemma by wondering out loud what Steve Jobs (or perhaps Richard Branson) would say/do. On the question of passion Jobs was a convert: a video circulates on the internet where he argues how necessary passion was for him to develop Apple, but how hard it is to live with. So we might think of passion at work as the Jobs manoeuvre at recruitment interview. The idea clearly has performative value for interviewers wishing to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Of course, since the idea is so cliched and so rehearsed from both sides of the interview table, it is hard to know how seriously either party takes it. So another way of interpreting a question about passion is a kind of shadow boxing where what’s really being asked about is the level of conformity an employer might expect. Perhaps the interview question is really: how much trouble are you going to be?
Meanwhile, other claims to passion in an organisational context are as unlikely-sounding as they are bizarre. You can be passed on the motorway by commercial vehicles claiming that the company is ‘passionate about logistics’ or ‘passionate about sandwiches’. Nothing is too trivial or mundane to attract one’s deepest feelings. Where work may be repetitive and boring, so it is thought possible to invest it with greater meaning by infusing it with emotional significance.
We should all be mindful of the Irish poet WB Yeats’ observation about passion in his poem The Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Anyone observing the UK during this disastrous three year period since the Brexit vote, culminating in the current leadership contest for the Conservative Party, might be able to see what Yeats was getting at, and what Jobs, to his credit, also realised: that your passion can be extremely exercising for everyone else around you. Passion on its own doesn’t get you out of the mess you’re in and might have landed you in the mess in the first place.
And yet there is something significant about caring about what one does. Work should matter given how much of our lives it takes up. The difficulty arises then, when it becomes a confessional requirement and/or performative marker of obedience. If it merely has the status of a thought-destroying cliché, then it no longer serves us well.
In Weber’s essay on Politics as a Profession he tries to explain two other facets of passion when taken up in political action which are often missed when passion at work is taken up as an edifying but thin invitation: a sense of proportion and a feeling of responsibility. Weber argues that the sense of proportion and responsibility for a cause, and one’s part in it, rescues the term passion from what he calls ‘sterile excitation’ , where people ‘intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations’. Passion is not just about you, but about the broader cause for which you are prepared to suffer, and those you implicate in your actions if you become a leader. And because of the dangers of blind passion, exposure of the self, and exposure of others, it needs a broader understanding of the social implications of what one is attempting:
‘that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ‘sterilely excited’ and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The ‘strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.’
Weber argues that no politician would have changed things had s/he not been prepared to attempt the impossible. However, attempting the impossible is undertaken with a passionate detachment and a sense of responsibility, to become a hero in ‘the sober sense of the word’. Weber is pointing to a paradox that one needs to be detached about one’s passionate commitments in order to engage more intensively. In the paradox of detached involvement it is also important not to lose sight of the suffering your passion might cause for everyone else, what kind of difficulties you implicate others in. So there are always ethical implications of having passions, particularly if they lead to passionate action.
Maybe there is something about passion which is worth hanging on to, not as some kind of bull-headed and individualistic pastiche of Steve Jobs, but as a social phenomenon which can have the full range of consequences, practical and ethical, for the group of which one is part. Being committed above and beyond what is required can be a very noble and inspiring thing for those around you. It can also be socially disastrous, and you might be experienced as over-committed to the wrong cause to the detriment of more generative relationships. Think on that in Brexit Britain.
Reflexivepractice 