Dave Berzack loves his career.  Check out his website, www.daveberzack.com, and you will see more evidence of the passion, and talent, he has for his chosen profession.  (Shout out to Dan Schawbel for pointing me to this video.)

Droppin science (here’s the secret) for live (for a great) 9 to 5 (career):  It’s about finding your passion.

Said in geeky consultant language:  The key to high levels of performance and achievement is aligning your work with your sources of intrinsic motivation . . . It’s about finding your passion!

When you can get out of bed every morning with the same spirit and sense of fun that Dave shows, you have found your bliss.  And bliss leads to the biggest career reward of all:  satisfaction.  If your goal is to make millions of dollars, well, success will depend upon your career choice, your effort and a bit of luck.  But if your definition of success is to have a sense of purpose and meaning,  to thrive and to have a consistent source of satisfaction, then build your work around what you love.

A young student from my alma mater called me a few months ago to learn more about the consulting profession.  He did a nice job of providing a verbal resume outlining his well-chosen major, his proper corporate summer internship and the reasons why that prepared him for an entry level job in consulting.  Based upon the facts alone, he was a good candidate for a job in the field.  Based upon the level of excitement in his voice, however, I was compelled to ask another question.

“What do you do for fun?”

He responded by saying, “Since I was a little kid I’ve played hockey.”  And for the next ten minutes told me about playing in hockey leagues four seasons every year, reffing for younger leagues when he was in high school and during the summer, coaching hockey at summer camps and meeting his favorite players at various events.  His tone was entirely different.  You could hear the smile in his voice.

“What are you doing with that?”  I asked.  Silence.

Not everyone can be a professional hockey player.  Not everyone can get a job in the hockey industry on a team, a league office, or an equipment manufacturer.  Although the more we talked, the more he discovered his options were much greater than the “conventional” jobs found in the college placement office.  He realized there were countless careers in the hockey world that were not just about playing.

More importantly, the more we talked, the more he realized there were aspects about hockey that could be translated to other potential career choices.  He enjoyed the camaraderie.  He enjoyed the competition, but he really valued the learning and growing and hard work, whether winning or not.  He also really enjoyed the teaching and development of others when reffing and coaching.

We didn’t have to talk any more about consulting.  He was fired up to listen to his heart and think about options that were more closely aligned with his innate talents, interests and joy.  He may yet end up in consulting, but if he does, it will be when he discovers it is the best place to live his purpose.

Oh, yeah, and by the way . . . If you are on the other end of this and looking for the job candidates who are going to knock your socks off, remember that no matter how killa the resume, you have to listen to the heart of the candidate.  It’s the employees who work from a sense of purpose and passion that will always, always kick it.

Orchestra conductors must exercise a unique style of leadership.  They must listen intently, and without saying a word, draw out strong performances from their orchestras.  This requires that they learn to be the ultimate collaborators,  understand the unique capabilities of each musician and decide how best to blend them into a coherent whole.

In this video, Itay Talgam shows that contrary to their popular image, the best conductors are not dictators.  Instead, they are successful by being great teachers and by mastering the art of helping others give voice to expressive contributions.  The most successful conductors believe in the inherent capacity of the people they lead to accomplish whatever is required.  The players may need to be coaxed, nudged and enticed, but masterful performances reside within them.

Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic and author of The Art of Possibility, suggests that one way to determine whether you are on track is to look into the eyes of those you lead.  “The eyes never lie. If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership is working. Human beings in the presence of possibility react physically as well as emotionally. If the eyes aren’t shining, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing that’s keeping my musicians’ eyes from shining?’”

Conductors, or leaders, who recognize that they do not need to make a sound or dominate or control, can focus on enabling others to be more effective.  They can help others feel energetic, lively, engaged and focused not only on the task at hand, but more importantly, connected and listening to the other musicians, their orchestral collaborators, required to make beautiful music.

Are we really surprised?

Companies have been obsessed with pay for performance for almost two decades.  And like any obsession, it has clouded the judgment of executives and others, such as human resources professionals and consultants, who should know better.

The problem is that pay for performance is founded on a two faulty beliefs:

1. If you reward something you get more of the behavior you want.
2. If you punish something you get less of the behavior you don’t want.

Unfortunately for our misguided execs, study after study has demonstrated results that massively contradict this way of thinking.  It’s hard to fault them entirely.  Logically, one would think that incentives work.  The science, however, has proven otherwise and has found:

1. As long as the job involves only mechanical skills or rules-based tasks, incentives work as expected.  The higher the incentive, the better the performance.
2. But once the job calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill—some conceptual and/or creative thinking—a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

These results have been replicated over and over again by psychologists, sociologists, and economists . . . including those funded by that left-wing, socialist institution, the U.S. Federal Reserve.  Even a recent study from McKinsey found that three noncash motivators—praise from immediate supervisors, attention from leaders, and a chance to direct projects—are at least as effective as the three most highly rated monetary ones.

Now, don’t misunderstand me.  Money is a motivator.  If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated to do the job.

Once you pay people enough, however, it is no longer a factor in motivating performance, especially in jobs that require basic cognitive, conceptual and creative skill . . . the majority of jobs in the U.S. economy.

Organizations must stop drinking the pay for performance Kool-Aid.  Pay for performance, carrot and stick management, performance appraisal, time clocks, verbal and written warnings, and many other management and HR practices are outdated and just don’t work.

Instead, it’s time to equip managers with the tools to manage in the modern workplace and support them with HR programs and practices that encourage the right behavior.  That’s about redefining what it is to manage and it’s about completely overhauling HR.  More importantly, it’s founded on the notion that we stop treating people like cogs in a machine and start treating them like smart, creative, self-motivated people who want to at all times do their best.

That’s not just some feel good manifesto.  It’s the fact-based, scientific reality required to be a high performing organization.

Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, has been researching great bosses for many years.   His last book was the New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.  His work suggests a number of techniques and behaviors that research has shown good bosses demonstrate.

More importantly, he has concluded that all the technique and behavior coaching in the world won’t make a boss great if that boss doesn’t also have a certain mindset.  Interestingly, these beliefs are held by the best bosses and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses.  Here are the key beliefs:

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

“I hope that at least in your eyes I have earned what all of you have done for me.”

Imagine the quality of our lives, our leadership and our service to each other if we asked this question everyday.

It’s simple, really.  Most “modern” corporations kill human capability the way we strip-mine and deplete the earth of natural resources.

Think about it.  We hire bright, ambitious, enthusiastic young people fresh out of the hope and idealism of school.  We stick them in cubicles under fluorescent lights away from windows so they can’t tell whether it’s day or night, sunny or rainy.  We tell them to dress a certain way, show up at a certain time, eat at a certain time, and stay late enough to make a good impression.  We encourage them to not express emotion, talk with the right jargon and tone, write with a particular style and embrace certain values and principles and mission statements.  And we force them to comply with standardized procedures, criticize their shortcomings when they fail to do so, and threaten their security if they get too far out of line.

It sounds a bit like the way cults program people, doesn’t it?  In fact, it’s not too far from the truth.  Cults program people to be silent, loyal, endure pain (to be “strong”), to do the jobs they’ve been assigned and to subscribe to the spiritual values of the group.

I’m not saying that corporations are cults . . . not really . . . I’m saying that the traditional structures of managerial control are designed for compliance and to produce performance within a steady, predictable, average range.

And that’s not good enough anymore.

While it’s cliché, the world is changing too fast, too dynamically, too organically, too symbiotically.  The old linear, command and control, carrot and stick model may work when you want compliance to routine tasks.  If, on the other hand, you want innovation, creativity and high performance, this doesn’t work.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson argues that we don’t get the best out of people because we educate them to become good workers, rather than to be creative thinkers.  Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says.

We can apply the same thinking to the way we manage people in organization life.  Take performance appraisal, for example.  The primary HR methodology pushed on organizations over the last 40 years is a standardized, “fast food” model.  It’s built around standard ratings as well as standard competencies or goals or some other check list for evaluation.  It’s meant to be batch processed once or twice per year and rolled up to higher executive, finance or HR authorities for approval.  The expectation is that our staff will fit a normalized distribution curve and that we won’t have too many people that exceed expectations.  This way the compensation distribution will fit the budget.

What’s the point of that approach?  Certainly not developing people.

To create an environment where people can reach their highest potential, you need the “Zagat or Michelin” approach where development, motivation, and engagement are “customized to local circumstances.”  In other words, talent is incredibly diverse even within the same department or function.  People have different aptitudes, passions and motivation.  To help them apply their unique gifts to their jobs, we have to tailor our approach and create the conditions where they will begin to thrive.

Instead of separating people from their natural talents so they can fit a standardized mode, we have to help them identify and connect those talents to the ways they can contribute.  Developing human potential is not a mechanical process.  It’s an organic process that requires customizing to your circumstances and personalizing our approach to managing to people we are managing.

We can’t do that simply by installing a new technology, rating methodology or competency model.  We do this by developing the ability of organization leaders to listen and identify the talents of employees, and to help them apply their gifts in unique and remarkable ways.

Business has become incredibly sophisticated. We have phenomenal technology and analytical tools as well as proven frameworks and methodology. Our ability to use science and reason has taken a significant amount of guesswork out of decision-making.

In addition, the number of college graduates in the U.S. workforce grew from 29 million in 1993 to 40.6 million in 2003. The number of college graduates who completed degrees in more than one broad field also increased from 3.4 million in 1993 to 5.6 million in 2003.

We are smarter, better, faster (cue the Six Million Dollar Man theme song).

Yet we still struggle to manage the human side of change or to have a conversation with an employee about job performance. It just goes to show you that intellect alone cannot improve our organizations.

I wonder whether it is because we have forgotten to put first things first: compassion, meaning, purpose. These, too, are the tools of great leaders.

The single-minded pursuit of financial return above everything else has given us . . . financial return. We got it, and now we can’t buy with it what we want to buy. We have pursued immediate gains while waving the flag of rational, practical decision-making. And in retrospect, we have made anything but rational, practical decisions.

The trouble with being rational is that it focuses too much on what is. And “what is” keeps us stuck in the weeds. Instead, we should be irrational dreamers focused on what can be because “what can be” raises our sites and lifts us higher.

In the above video from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl delivers a powerful message about the human search for meaning — and a most critical way of approaching our work with others. Frankl says,

“If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. If we over estimate him and look at him higher, we promote him to what he really can be. We have to be idealists. If you don’t recognize man’s search for meaning, you make him worse, you make him dull, you make him frustrated. There must be a spark of a search for meaning. Let’s recognize it. Let’s presuppose it, then you will illicit it and you will make him become what he is principally capable of becoming.”

Take it higher . . .

“This integrated talent management solution ushers in a new era for our company that’s about improving how we think about and manage talent.  These new tools will enhance our ability to identify the talent our business needs to grow and to be successful.  Acquiring, rewarding and retaining high performers are the keys to our success as a company.”

It’s hard to disagree with the above statement (except for the notion that technology will solve the problem!).  It boldly reaffirms the old homily:  People are our greatest asset.

But that’s just the point.  It’s unimaginative, overused, and as a result, rarely perceived as sincere.  And in the case of most companies, especially in the era of constant “restructuring” (see The Trouble with Layoffs), it rarely is sincere.

If you think I’m being tough, just listen to some of the quotes from employees and managers working for companies pushing the talent mind-set:

• Across the organization, I’m not sure we do a good job of hiring.  We seem to be more impressed with credentials than capability.  What I mean is it’s more important for you to have gone to an Ivy, than to actually be able to do the job.
• Performance management is a once a year process that managers and employees dread.
• Performance appraisal is not really about performance.  It’s about adjusting ratings to fit the merit budget.
• We believe in pay for performance.  High performers get significantly greater merit increases and performance bonuses.  But beyond sales, I’m not sure we measure performance well.
• We are very proud of our succession planning process . . . but we have never promoted anyone as a result of the effort.  The information isn’t used.
• We do not actively manage the development of our employees, even high potentials (Note:  the engagement survey data confirmed this).

The obsession with talent is a sign that executives aren’t leading.  They are failing to appreciate and nurture the potential of their existing employees.

Like love-struck teenagers, these executives are unpredictable, reactive and focused desperately on short-term gratification.  They are always on the lookout for the perfect resume, the “star,” the romance of the moment.  They seek the dream employee who is so smart that no training, motivation, supervision or coaching will be required.

Much of this obsession is based on the faulty assumption that top performance depends primarily on talent—innate, genetically-based qualities.  There is considerable evidence that hard work and intrinsic motivation—which can be supported or undermined by the social environment—also play central roles.

For example, researchers studying the impact of learning environments on cognitive skills have discovered that students who over an extended period of time are treated as if they are intelligent actually become so.  If they are taught demanding content, and are expected to explain and find connections as well as memorize and repeat, they learn more and learn more quickly. They think of themselves as learners. They are able to bounce back in the face of short-term failures.

These results are giving rise to the new idea of intelligence-in-practice:  Intelligence is the habit of persistently trying to understand things and make them function better.  Intelligence is working to figure things out, varying strategies until a workable solution is found.  Intelligence is knowing what one does, and doesn’t, know, seeking information and organizing that information so that it makes sense and can be remembered.  In short, one’s intelligence is the sum of one’s habits of mind.

Maybe in the case of executives currently obsessed with finding unicorns, intelligence is knowing that such potential is already hard at work in their own organization.  Intelligence is knowing when you lead them, they will perform.

After struggling to develop a viable electric light-bulb for months and months, Thomas Edison was interviewed by a young reporter who boldly asked Mr. Edison if he felt like a failure and if he thought he should just give up by now. Perplexed, Edison replied, “Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.” And shortly after that, and over 10,000 attempts, Edison invented the light bulb.

Failure is one of the best things we can do to enhance our ability to be successful. It’s too bad that so many organization leaders don’t understand this.

Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has been studying how people handle failure for 40 years. Her research has led her to identify two distinct mind-sets that dramatically influence how we react to it.

A fixed mind-set is grounded in the belief that talent is genetic–you’re a born artist, athlete, or financial whiz.  Individuals with a fixed mind-set believe they are entitled to success without much effort and regard failure as an outrage and caused by something outside of themselves. When things get tough, they are quick to blame, withdraw, lie, and even avoid future challenge or risk.  In the fixed mindset it’s not enough to succeed, you have to be flawless and you have to be flawless right away.  Either you have “it” or you don’t.

A growth mind-set, on the other hand, assumes that talent is not genetically based and that effort and learning make everything possible. Because the ego isn’t on the line as much, the growth mind-set sees failure as opportunity rather than insult.  When challenged, it’s quick to reassess, adjust, and try again.  In fact, it relishes this process.

When those with growth mind-sets fail at a task, Dweck found that they enter a more focused mental state as they try to figure out their mistake.  And in subsequent trials, they improve. In effect, they’ve learned, and their brains have “grown.” Those with fixed mind-sets, however, never enter this focused state of learning and show little, if any, progress.  Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Chieti, Italy, back this up and have used MRI’s to show that individuals with a growth mind-set actually “sculpt” the brains wiring.

Interestingly enough, the fixed mindset and its desire to think of oneself as perfect is often referred to as the “CEO disease.”  To be fair to CEO’s I would extend this obsession with infallibility to all the wannabe kings that exist in organization life . . . right down to many project managers.  And this explains why so many leaders fail to behave adaptively during times of change.

One of the primary reasons I’ve seen change initiatives fall off the rails is because project teams hate reporting bad news.  And they hate reporting bad news because project sponsors, project managers, organization leaders, procurement, and other technically-focused, fixed mind-set types sit on the sidelines waiting to pounce.  When something goes wrong, they quickly point the finger . . . at the vendor, the contract, the functional leader, each other or whomever and whatever is an easy scapegoat.

Consequently, this kind of environment causes project managers and teams to hide problems rather than coming clean about a missed deadline or an unclear project specification.  Eventually the problems escalate, and instead of learning, growing, and moving the project forward, everyone starts worrying about being judged.  As Dweck says, “It starts with the bosses’ worry about being judged, but it winds up being everybody’s fear about being judged.  It’s hard for courage and innovation to survive in companies with this mindset.”

Amen, sister!

Years after his mother pulled him out of school when the teacher thought him unteachable, Edison recalled, “My mother was the making of me.  She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”  She didn’t see the imperfection.  She saw the potential.

Success is not defined by perfect pedigrees, perfect resumes, and perfect personas.  It’s not even defined by perfect project plans or perfect execution.  Instead, it’s achieved by adapting, learning, growing and the constant warts-and-all quest for improvement.