Can Passion For Your Work Drive Burnout? With Jon Jachimowicz

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3:21Look, at this point, it's a cliche in most industries and certainly for high achievers. Follow your passion and professional success will come from that, right? Lead with passion, the rest will follow. And we see tech leaders and nonprofit visionaries and everyone in between talk about how important it is to really believe in your work and to have it constantly motivate you to feel fulfillment from the job itself and the purpose. Passion is what drives me and my work most days, and you can probably relate. But today on the show, I speak with Harvard Business School professor Jan Janjimowicz, who studies what causes passion and what passion results in.

4:07He has found that the downside of passion might just be burnout. When we're in a passionate state, when we're having a passionate day, we feel like we could walk on air, right? Maybe work doesn't even feel like work. But what happens the next day when we're not having such a great day? And what happens when all that passion leads us to ignore taking care of ourselves or overworking? Especially for us high achieving types, passion can sometimes take us to an unhealthed place and so we need to be intentional about it. And even more, companies themselves need a passion strategy. So let's learn more about why exactly that is and how it affects us as workers, leaders, and organizations.

4:54Do you tell your students ever, find your passion? So I, it's a complicated question. It's kind of a joke. It's a very, I know, like, it's kind of a joke, but it's like, there's, there's a lot of heft in that question. So two things. I think one of the challenges is why would I tell them when they already all know that. They all walk through the door knowing that that's what they should be doing. There are posters on campus that say, make a meaningful difference. The motto of the school is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Me saying it to them, it wouldn't change anything.

5:27It's just where their head's already at. So I don't have to tell them. When I was at Columbia Business School, I ran a survey where I surveyed the incoming class of MBA students. And I asked them how how important is passion in your future career, like pursuing your passion? Over 90 % of students list that as their top priority. It's interesting to think through where are students when they graduate versus 10 years post-graduation. I would wager, even though I don't have the data, but I would wager that 10 years post-graduation, the importance of passion and careers has decreased. I think the further out you go, the importance of passion decreases until I think close before retirement age when people start thinking about their legacy.

6:05And then they start thinking about the impact that they want to have on the world and particular people who have been in careers up until that point where maybe they've prioritized making a lot of money or being someone, being powerful. Then they start thinking about, okay, but what is it that I really want to leave behind? And do I want to leave behind something in addition to what I've achieved so far? But I have no data. This is me just ripping. Why do you study passion? I'm so interested. I've never met someone who studied passion in the context of work and leadership. So I got my PhD at Columbia.

6:38I wanted to study inequality. My parents are both refugees. I was born and raised in Germany. So I was very aware of the fact that the world is not fair, that inequality exists as a prevalent factor. I felt it. I experienced it. I saw it. And I was really passionate about addressing inequality such that I would have an effect on making the world more just and providing more opportunities or more equal opportunities for people. I wanted to address inequality. And I thought through research is the way to do that. So I was in the UK at the time. I was getting my master's degree. I left behind everything that I knew.

7:17I moved to New York. And I thought, finally, like I'm finally doing this thing. and I remember this moment viscerally. It was about a year into my program and I was staring at my computer screen and I had this realization that this passion that had driven me and propelled me all the way across the ocean, it wasn't there anymore. I wasn't feeling that passion anymore. It was a discombobulating event. I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't understand like what was happening. And it was, I mean, I think scary is, doesn't quite describe it. It was much more than scary. Like it was like a fundamental, like I've sacrificed so much to be here.

7:58Am I an idiot for doing all of this? Like, am I actually really passionate about this inequality thing? Or did I just, I don't know, am I misguided in my belief? And I did what every budding researcher would do, which is I looked at the academic literature to figure out like, what does the academic literature say about passion? And the academic literature up until this point had talked about passion as something that people either have or don't have. And so the implication of that research is like, if I'm not feeling passionate anymore, it meant that maybe I was never passionate to begin with, which didn't help.

8:28This is like, you ought to be HD student. So I went to my advisor and other senior colleagues and I asked them like, hey, I'm not feeling this passionate thing anymore. What should I do about it? And they said, Oh, don't worry about it. This is a very normal thing that happens to people. It'll come back. And then also like, you know, as a type A personality, someone telling you like, don't worry about something that like, you're really worried about also doesn't help. That wasn't helpful. And so I asked everybody that I knew to refer me to the most passionate person that they knew. Luckily, this was New York City.

9:01So lots of people who are trying to chase dreams and make a difference. And over the course of the next three or four years, ended up talking to over 200 people. Like I was talking to Michelin star chefs. I was talking to Fortune 500 CEOs. I was talking to athletes, artists. I was talking to people like at all levels of the organization. I was talking to entry-level workers, nonprofit workers, people at the very top and so on. And a common story that I heard from almost everybody was that they'd experienced the same thing that I was experiencing, that at some point in their life, they had fallen out of passion with what they were doing.

9:39And they had to engage in concerted efforts to figure out why that happened and how they had to go about regaining their passion. And that now they're in this new phase of their life where they think about their passion as something that they have to maintain and look after and manage very carefully. So rather than thinking about something that they have or not have as a much more tenuous state that they need to look after. And that completely changed my understanding of how I think about passion. In the process, I also started realizing that what I care about, it turns out, is people. Now that I study passion, I get to do that.

10:18I get to focus on people who want to make the world a better place, people who want to address inequality. And the story that I tell myself is I still study inequality, but I study it in an indirect way. I study the people who want to address inequality or the people that want to make the world a better place, but for whatever reason are struggling in maintaining their passion or their passion is leading them astray. And if I do research that figures out how I can help them, ultimately I'm still making a difference on inequality except that in this scenario, I get to actually see the difference that I'm making because I get to interact with the people and I get to see the outcomes of the work that I'm doing.

10:52And that's what I need for myself. I'm the kind of person that wants to work with people and wants to see how the work that I'm doing has a meaningful impact on people. So this whole journey of self-discovery led to who I am today, why I study passion, also makes for the best joke in the world. I'm passionate about passion. Ha ha ha. Isn't that great? But it's really, it was this, I wanted to understand a puzzle that I was facing myself. And in the process, I saw that this was a puzzle that everybody who is pursuing their passion has faced in their life. And that actually, like, this isn't really a puzzle.

11:25It's just a fundamental misunderstanding. I want to talk about burnout and passionate people because you said that one of the things you care about is keeping the people with the passion to change the world sort of healthy and able to keep doing it. Why is burnout related to your passion for your work? One of the ways to think about this is that there is, I think, an unfortunate use of the word passion to describe two different things. We use the word passion to refer to what people are passionate about, right? So people say, my passion is X. Like, I am passionate about inequality. I am passionate about football, whatever that might be.

12:10But we also use the word passion to refer to the momentary experience, how I am feeling today, right now. I'm feeling really passionate about this. I'm burning on the inside. Like today, I really feel like I can climb a mountain. And the reason why this distinction is important is because the thing that you are passionate about, that doesn't change so much day to day, week to week. What we care about changes over time with like understanding ourselves, learning about the world, life events that happen to us. But day to day, they don't change that much. But what varies a lot more day to day is how passionate I feel.

12:50Even the most passionate people amongst us will have days when they feel less passionate for what they do. And that's totally normal and completely fine. The reason I bring this up is because in order to understand what burnout is in passionate people, we need to understand that passion can vary from day to day. Even somebody who is highly passionate for what they care about can experience days, weeks, or months where they are not feeling that passion anymore. And that can be really challenging, particularly when they're in an environment that has high demands on them, that requires them to work long hours, or where there's a lot of emotional situations that are happening, they're engaging with clients or other beneficiaries of their work.

13:34And when they're not feeling that passion in the moment, those demands can be overwhelming and manifest in what we will call burnout. Because there's a mismatch of the passion they need to summon to do the job at the level they're supposed to? So on days when I'm feeling more passionate, it makes me feel as if I have the ability to deal with more demands in my day, right? Like there's the saying, if you do what you love, you never work another day in your life. It's partly true and partly wrong. It's partly true in that on days when I am feeling particularly passionate, my day goes by faster. It is less It's exhausting for me to work harder and I feel like I can give more of myself.

14:20But that doesn't necessarily mean that on every single day I will feel more passionate, meaning on days when I am feeling less passionate for my work, no matter how much I love what I do, it is not going to feel easy. It's going to feel very difficult and whatever demands I have in my day might overwhelm me and manifest in something that could lead to burnout. One of your experiments found that people who are more passionate on a given day were less likely to take a break at work, which makes sense, right? You're into flow. You don't want to stop. You don't get hungry. But tell us what that implies in terms of burnout and the sort of bigger picture.

15:02Yeah, absolutely. So this was a paper that we published last year together with Troy Bredehorst, who was at the University of Cologne. And basically what we looked at is what the consequences are of a really passionate day. So I think just as you mentioned, Maura, on a really passionate day, when I feel like I have more energy, I am more enthused to make a difference, things come easier to me, I have this greater perceived resource that I can access. And so I will work harder. And not only will I work harder, but I'll be less likely to take a break. and I'll be more likely to work longer hours and I'll be more likely to take on additional work.

15:40Somebody gives me five tasks, I'll do six. We see that happening on a particularly passionate day. What ends up happening, however, is that when I come home that day, I am less likely to psychologically detach from the really demanding day that I just had, which means that I don't actually have the ability to recover. Just like an athlete, when we run really far and really hard and really fast, we also need to recover more. But passion deceives people into believing that they don't need to do that right now. And so people actually do that less. They detach less, they recover less. And what it means is that on the following days, on a day following a particularly passionate day, people reported higher levels of emotional exhaustion, which is one of the facets of burnout.

16:28And the reason why that's challenging is that the more emotionally exhausted you are, the less passionate you can feel because you just don't have the emotional capacity left to be passionate, right? Like when I'm feeling emotionally exhausted, it's hard to marshal that passion for what it is that I'm doing. And so it becomes this like really negative self-reinforcing negative spiral. The more passionate you are, the less you detach, the more exhausted you are, the less passionate you are, the more demands can overwhelm you, the more burned out you can be and so on and so on. And that's one of the spirals through which passion can burn you out.

17:04It makes a ton of sense. It's funny. I was reflecting on this myself where people always tell me I'm passionate and I love my work. But with clients, for example, I'm so passionate about what they're doing and I love our work together that they come to expect a certain level of energy for me. Oh yeah, Maura will respond at 6am because she loves this. And then their expectation gets set. And then some days I just can't do it or I slowly get more burnt out. Yeah. No, you're so right. I think that's the, there's like this whole second part to the story, I think that you're highlighting, which is the perceptions we form about what it means to be passionate or the societal narrative that we have about like what it means to be passionate is so contrary to the experience of what it's actually like to be passionate and to pursue your passion every single day.

17:54And I think this disconnect between the societal narrative and expectations that we have of what it means to be passionate and the actual experience only further contributes and exacerbates many of the challenges inherent in this experience of what it means to be passionate, right? So what you're referring to is that like you have these high expectations of passionate other people that we think that if you do what you love, you never have to work another day in your life, that it should feel easy, that every day you're going to show up and love what you do and work longer hours, which we know is not true, but that's the expectation that we have for you personally, knowing that other people have these expectations of you is this pressure that leads you to have to perform for other people.

18:38Like you feel like you don't have the license to tell other people, wait a minute, I know you think I'm passionate, but actually like I'm really tired today. For other people, that is such a disconnect with what they expect of you that you were worried to raise that. I often wonder whether that actually is true and whether people would actually give you a lot more leeway in speaking up about that. We have some data that I collected together with Zach Barry, who's at the University of Southern California, showing that people often misperceive how they would be judged. But certainly, I think that expectation in and of itself, whether or not that expectation is actually true and manifest, it doesn't matter.

19:16If it's a belief in your head, then that belief ends up driving what you feel, what you do, and can ultimately just further exacerbate some of the negative consequences that you experience. This is an ad for a book, but not just any book. It is a book that will change the way you think about business and maybe how you run your business. It's called Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus. I want to tell you about one of my favorite concepts in the book. It's called the abyss. You've all seen the visualization from Anthropic, right? It's a big blue blob of what jobs AI could wipe out, including finance, management, computer science, legal.

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23:41That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever. I want to dive in a little bit in terms of our social expectations of what passion looks like and the sort of performative nature of passion. You and colleagues have found that regardless of the actual level of passion, extroverted employees, people who tend to be more energized by social interactions and probably use more gestures and change their, like I'm doing right now, like showing up in a way that in Western culture signals passion, are perceived as more passionate than introverts who might tend to express their passion in a more solitary, less performative way.

24:26Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So this is a paper that we published last year together with Kai Crowder, who's one of my PhD students, and Annabelle Bichner, who's in Berlin. And we did this work, and I think with a similar intuition to you, where we started with this idea that people who are more extroverted are also more likely to be more expressive in how they engage in many emotional expressions. And they're also more likely to just spend time around other people, providing them with more opportunities to notice how you might feel. And particularly when it comes to passion, I think we have these stereotypical expectations that passion looks a particular way, right?

25:08It looks like your eyes light up, you use animated facial expressions and a lot of gestures. Right. Your enthusiasm is infectious. I always think of that one. Yeah, right. And your voice, you're supposed to speak louder and with greater variation in your voice. You're supposed to be really loud and then really quiet and draw people in. This is how you're supposed to express passion. And people know this. We're not just making this up. We ask hundreds and hundreds of people, how do you think passion should be expressed? Or how do you look for passion in other people? But we did this other thing where we asked people, when you're passionate, what do you do?

25:47Which is, I think, the more natural question to ask. And we found that, yes, part of these gestures and animated facial expressions, these more stereotypical expressions, this is part of the puzzle. This is part of the things that people do when they feel more passionate. But people also do a bunch of other things, you know, like they immerse themselves more in their work. They get really focused. They spend more time doing things. They care more about the quality of their work. There's a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with these stereotypical expectations. But here's where things get really interesting.

26:19And I think you highlighted extroversion or how extroverted or how introverted a person is might help us understand some of the challenges here. What we found is that people who are more extroverted generally, when you look at the variety of behaviors that people can engage in when they are more passionate about their work, not only do they engage more of the stereotypical behaviors of passion, they also engage more in the non-stereotypical expressions of passion. So they express their passion, not just in the more stereotypical ways, but also in just more diverse ways, more broadly. And what that means is that there are more opportunities to notice different kinds of behaviors that more extroverted people engage in when they are more passionate.

27:06And what we find is that this leads to this really challenging outcome whereby people who might experience the same levels of passion, introverts and extroverts alike, from an observer's perspective, we think that the extroverted person actually is more passionate. And again, from the internal experience, we see that the introvert and the extrovert, they feel the same level of passion. But from the perceiver's side, they rate the extroverted person to be more passionate. And that's problematic. It's problematic for a variety of things. One of the things is that being seen as passionate is associated with a lot of interpersonal rewards, meaning that we're more likely to want to help somebody who is more passionate.

27:50So we're more likely to offer them support. We're more likely to go out of our way to help make that person be successful. We're also more likely to offer more passionate people or people we perceive to be more passionate, more opportunities to develop and grow. And that ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we think that somebody else is more passionate, we offer them more opportunities and offer them more help and support. They will end up becoming better employees. They will end up performing better. But that also means that for more introverted employees, they're not stupid. They see that all of this is happening, so it only amps up the pressure that they experience to appear more passionate.

28:31And that burns them out more, and it becomes this really negative spiral where now that they have to appear more passionate, that is more exhausting for them, right? And then they are less likely to reap any sort of benefit from being seen as passionate because they have to invest so much energy and time into appearing passionate that they actually have detriments from feeling passionate. Yes. We think of passion as this uniformly good thing, but once you look under the hood, you see how in these different ways it can lead people askew and it's just really challenging. My first book was about, it was called Hiding in the Bathroom, How to Get Out There When You'd Rather Stay Home.

29:09It was sort of a love letter to my favorite introverts and people with social anxiety because our society does demand the performance of extroversion, especially if you're an entrepreneur or if you're in sales and marketing. And I spent most of my career in marketing. And so I can't tell you how many people in sales and marketing I've interviewed over the years who have said, I've been a fake extrovert for my entire career. I interviewed a really senior woman at Dow Jones in New York. She was the head of sales. And she said, do you know how many times I've had to take advertisers and clients and vendors and whomever out to frigging Yankees games till midnight on a Tuesday?

29:45I hate baseball, you know. But the performance of that infectious energy, certainly in the U.S., it's so confusing. It's construed as passion, which makes people feel confidence. And a lot of us are just faking that performance. So I'm going to offer a nuanced take on this. I'm going to say this is both problematic and I don't think that this is what's problematic about it. Being a fake extrovert and being exhausted by it. Yeah, I think like appearing passionate in some ways. There are certain situations where it can be helpful to appear passionate. Imagine you're a professor at a top tier university and you are teaching on a subject matter that you care about very deeply.

30:34When you appear passionate for the subject matter, your students are going to be more excited. They're going to be more likely to want to be engaged and probably more likely to learn from you in that interaction. Right. So it makes sense that in this highly stylized example that may or may not apply to one of us that like you benefit from appearing passionate in the moment. Right. And like and I'm an introvert, like I make that very clear to my students throughout the semester. It's not me putting on like a performance. I feel that passion. I would just usually express it differently. But for the for the purposes of class time, this is how I show up and I do this because I think it's beneficial and conducive to their learning.

31:16So this is one half of the story. The problem is when I then don't have the ability to recover from that, when this becomes an expectation, not just for the 80 minutes of class that I have once or twice a day, but when it becomes an expectation for like eight to 10 hours of work, that's when things become problematic. There's this researcher, his name is Brian Little, and he coined this phrase that I absolutely love. He calls it acting out of character. And acting out of character has two meanings. Okay. So one of the meanings is acting out of character, meaning you act in ways that are different from your character.

31:55You're acting out. It's just not who you are. That's one way of thinking about it. So when an introvert engages in behaviors that we associate with more stereotypical expressions of passion, that can be very different from what we might expect an introvert to do. So that introvert is acting out. But at the same time, acting out can also mean because, acting out of character, because this is who I am and this is what I care about. So even though I am an introvert and stereotypical expressions of passion aren't necessarily who I am, I also really care about the subject matter that I teach. And if for the subject matter that I teach, it's important for me to engage in stereotypical expressions of behavior, of course I'm going to engage in them.

32:37That's actually really important for me to do. As long as I have what Brian Little calls restorative niche, by that he means time and space to be more in concordance with what my natural levels of stimulation are, then that's fine. So in his case, Brian Little was the highest rated professor at Harvard three years in a row. If you ask Brian Little on a scale of one to 10, one being extreme introvert and 10 being extreme extrovert, where he stands, he will tell you that he's a one. He's the most introverted person that you will have ever met. However, if you see Brian Little in the classroom, he's probably the most extroverted person that you've ever seen.

33:21That's because it's his job. I mean, introverts, when we have a job to do, I mean, Oprah is an introvert. Barack Obama is an introvert. Famous comedians. Like when we're performing because we have a job, there's no one more dazzling, right? Yeah. But you know what Brian Little does after class. He goes to the bathroom. He puts his feet on the toilet, closes the door and just sits for a little bit. That is a really, that's taking hiding in the bathroom to the next level. Yeah. I mean, he's, you know, I mean. I love it. You can like, but that's what he does because that's what he needs. I think it's just understanding yourself better.

33:54And for me, the phrase acting out of character has given me so much leeway and permission to understand that I can be authentic and as an introvert still invest a lot of time and effort into engaging in stereotypical passionate expressions. Thinking about the fact that when we show up with passion, we may push ourselves too hard. And also that performing passion may also drive some burnout. How does a boss manage a super passionate person? in a sustainable way? I think that's a great question. I would probably start by saying a super passionate employee will have days when they are more passionate and days when they are less passionate.

34:42And on days on which they are more passionate, they are probably less likely to notice that they're engaging in behaviors that will be challenging for them and more likely to engage in behaviors that will ultimately be to their detriment. Meaning, I think we have this assumption, I don't have data on this, but I think we have this assumption just by talking to people that when we manage an employee who is more passionate, we believe that this employee needs less scrutiny, that this employee needs less supervision. This employee is more of a self-starter and is able to manage themselves really well.

35:21I actually think it's the opposite. I think that people who are more passionate probably need more supervision, that they probably need more managerial oversight, like in a different way than perhaps other people. But here's what that can, for example, look like. So if I'm a manager and I noticed that one of my employees shows up and they have a lot of passion that day, all my warning signs should go off. Really? What that means is that I should be particularly careful because if I ask that person to take on more work today, they're more likely to say yes. If I ask that person to stay longer today, they're more likely to go above and beyond.

35:58And that might be cool for today, but that means that tomorrow and the next day after that, they're going to be more burned out. And if I need my business to thrive today and the next day, that can be really challenging. It's different if we're in a sprint. If it's a sprint and we have a deadline to hit, and then after the deadline, we can take a break, that's different. But if I'm hoping to have an employee who's going to show up tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, if they show up particularly passionate, that should tell me that I should pay more attention to what they're up to today because they might put themselves into situations that can actually be more difficult for them to manage down the line.

36:36I might also, for instance, recommend that they go home a little earlier today because even though they are more passionate, they're investing more time and energy into their work already. So by the time they go home, even though they might not feel that exhausted, they will be that exhausted because they've invested more time and energy into their work. So let me send them home earlier so that they have more time to psychologically detach from their work, more time to recover so they can show up tomorrow and hopefully be similarly passionate. Because that's what I want to do. I want to be able to help people maintain that level of passion and not have that whiplash, like where you go and have a super passionate day and then a super low day and a super, like that's not good for performance, You need to just keep going, keep going, keep going.

37:23That's how you make a difference at work in most professions. Again, that's where the societal narrative that we have around passion as something that's easy and that makes you feel good, I think that's where it leads you askew, not just from a personal perspective of you yourself, but then also from a manager's perspective, where I think at the moment we kind of hang back and let people do their thing, when in reality we should probably get engaged more and maybe manage and provide more oversight. And yet some organizations and managers exploit passion, right? Yeah. There's this great paper that Jae Hyun Kim did that was published in 2020 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

38:04And what they find in that paper is that people feel like it is more permissible, more legitimate to assign additional unpaid tasks to more passionate employees. And the mechanism that they find, or the reason that they find people feel more comfortable doing that, is that we believe that more passionate employees will enjoy those additional assigned tasks more. That they are more likely to see it as an opportunity to grow and to learn, or as an act of service that they are willing to do because they are so passionate about this job. And if you start extrapolating that to the world and the employment relations that you see, what that means is that we might feel like it's more legitimate to pay more passionate people less or to say that like in environments where passion is highly prevalent, that, you know, maybe you have to work longer hours or you have to go above and beyond more often, you know, because you're one of the lucky ones.

39:09You're one of the people that gets to pursue work that they're passionate about. Did you happen to watch the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary on Netflix? No, I haven't. Is that what they talk about? It's unbelievable. I recommend everybody watch it. But, you know, the Dallas Cowboys is one of the wealthiest franchises in global sports. They pay their cheerleaders about the equivalent of someone who works at a fast food restaurant with bake. And these are incredible athletes, incredible professionals, right? work endless, endless days. And the whole model for it is, well, they're just so passionate to show up and be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and represent this global brand, right?

39:51And they've perpetuated for decades this exploitation. It's exactly what you're talking about. So here's my argument for why we should pay passionate employees better, which I think everybody passionate is going to say, yay. But beyond the moral case, Obviously, it's the morally right thing to do, but here's the business case for it. If you're being underpaid, you are more likely to have feelings and thoughts of financial insecurity. These feelings and thoughts of financial insecurity will take up a lot of your mind. It's just really hard to focus on work when you're worried about how to make ends meet.

40:25There's this great paper that Yuris Moyers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote, showing that people who have higher levels of financial insecurity also perform worse at their job, holding everything else equal. What that means is that if you pay your passionate employees less, right, if you exploit them, then you are also not setting them up for success when it comes to performance, meaning they are more likely to have thoughts of financial insecurity. Those thoughts will crowd out their ability to focus on their work. And ultimately, no matter how passionate they are, that might not outweigh their challenge of focusing on their work because they're worried about how to make ends meet.

41:07But if you pay them better, then they can be freed up. They don't have to worry so much about how to make ends meet. And all that additional headspace that they now have, they can dedicate to working better or doing other things that they want to pay attention to. But I think that's the business case of it. It's not a sustainable solution to underpay people and say passion is what allows people to keep going. That might work in the short term, but that's a band-aid solution. In the long term, people are going to burn out when they feel financially insecure, or they're going to leave that profession altogether.

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46:04That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. So how do smart employers, smart organizations, smart managers think holistically about passion? Do they need a passion strategy? I totally think that organizations need a passion strategy. I think that it's self-serving, but at the moment we kind of have like one form of managing employees. That form of managing employees is based on how we think about employees that are motivated for extrinsic reasons or are motivated because they want to have a great career. And we apply the similar mental model to managing passionate employees.

46:45And I don't think that this mental model works. I'll give you one very concrete example. Say that you are a nurse and you are really passionate about making a difference in your patients' lives. If you want to advance in an organization, the only way that you can advance is by being promoted. What is challenging about being promoted is that you can get promoted into a nurse manager position. When you're a nurse manager, you spend your day managing other nurses. You no longer interact with patients. But patients and seeing how your individual efforts make a difference in patients' lives is what you are passionate about.

47:23Meaning, like you get promoted, but after you get promoted, you don't get to do the work that you're passionate about anymore. So something here is broken, right? Like that doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it's the same if you're thinking about this example, it happens in every single industry. If you're a software developer and you work in an organization, the only way up in an organization is to move into a managerial rank. And as a software developer, if you love how to code and to create beautiful programs, once you get promoted, you are a manager of software developers. You don't get to code anymore.

47:53Like the same thing happens again and again and again in industry after industry. But that's because our model of managing employees is based on employees who are extrinsically motivated or employees who want to have a career. Like what would the analogous example look like for a strategy around managing employees who are motivated because they're passionate for what they do? Well, you certainly wouldn't promote them into a position where they no longer get to do what they're passionate about, right? Like we have to think about a different way of designing this. And this is just promotions. This is one example.

48:26But you can apply this to many different organizational challenges that you face and how you do and how you manage employees. And you start realizing that our mental model for managing passionate employees needs to be very different. How would job interviews change? The problem with job interviews, we know this. There's tons of research on this. They're not particularly diagnostic. Like what are you learning in a job interview that will lead you to determine whether the person that you're interviewing is a good fit? The thing that job interviews are really good at is for screening applicants that are like you, that are similar to you, which is a cognitive bias that people experience.

49:05Meaning I am more likely to like someone in an interaction when they are more similar to me. This is information I can glean in an interview. And this is information that ends up biasing my decisions on whom to hire. So if I interview someone, I think they're similar to me. I like them more. I'm more likely to hire them. This is the sort of information you can glean in a job interview. So I don't know. I'm not sure how job interviews would change. I don't know if we need job interviews, but it's a whole different question. I think what's interesting, what I'm thinking about is, you know, I don't think we really understand how to manage true passion, it sounds like, for the long haul.

49:43And again, you can be great at performing passion in an interview, probably, but you could just be having a good day. You know, your anxiety could be driving what seems like passion. I don't know. I don't know if you've watched Inside Out. Oh, yeah. You know, I think it's a movie that should be like required watching for children and adults alike. You know, you don't know what like, quote unquote, emotion on the inside is driving your outward expression. I just find it like really helpful to have that frame in mind when I'm, you know, when you're interacting with other people, you don't necessarily know what's the saying, like you can't judge someone's insides by their outsides.

50:18Nope. But I think to your point, I think organizations need a passion strategy because I think the goal should be that organizations should help employees sustain their passion over time. The way organizations think about passion, for the most part, is that they say passion is something that I look for in the hiring process. I want to hire passionate employees. And as I mentioned earlier, that there's a folly because just because you're passionate about something doesn't mean that you experience it every single day. But I think organizations hire employees they deem to be passionate, and that's that.

50:51And they think that that's enough to translate into positive outcomes for their organization. And again, that's not a silly idea. They're partially right. There's research that shows that on average, employees who are more passionate for their work are also more likely to perform better. Heck, I've done some of that research. But the problem is that over time, passion is difficult to maintain for all of the negative spirals, part of which we've talked about here, part of which we continue to do research on. Passion is really difficult to maintain day to day, like feeling that passion day to day is really challenging.

51:27Not only is it really difficult to maintain, feeling really passionate can be one of the reasons why you are feeling less passionate on the next day. Like passion in and of itself has a quality where if you don't tend to it, if you don't look after it, it can lead to burnout, right? Like similar to all the people that I interviewed when I myself was struggling with this, this is a hard lesson that everybody has to learn. Now, the challenge here is twofold. I think on the one hand, if you don't learn that lesson yourself that you have to maintain your passion, at some point, you're unable to come back.

52:02Like at some point, the pain of trying to do what you're passionate about, but it kind of like not working for you or the demands being overwhelming for you are likely to lead you to exit that profession or exit that work or that line of work to decrease the priority of how important passion is in your future career. you become cynical and then you do other things. And like, I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. Maybe for some people, passion or pursuing a career that they're passionate about was always a bad fit. I don't even think that like everybody in their lives should pursue work that they're passionate about.

52:33I don't think that's the case. I think passion is for some people and not for everybody. Well, you might have a passionate hobby, right? Yeah, exactly. Like I love cooking. I'm not going to be a chef. I've watched enough of the TV show The Bear to know that Kitchens and I, like we do not align on how we like to work. But that doesn't mean that like, you know, anyway, so I don't think that everybody has to pursue their passion at work. But the problem is that I think if people themselves don't learn the lesson of how to maintain their own passion, more people are going to leave passion as an objective or priority in their career than perhaps otherwise should have.

53:08I think that's one part of the problem. I think the other part of the problem is for organizations. If they don't manage their employees' passion, meaning if they kind of just hire employees who they deem are passionate for the work that they're doing, but leave it at that, their employees will end up burning out and performing worse than they otherwise could have. Meaning they're not leveraging all of the strengths that passion provides. And as a result, they will have employees that are not performing to the fullest of their potential. And this is what frustrates me. I went into this line of work and I started studying passion because I wanted to understand how can we make a difference in the world or how can we address some of the big societal challenges that we face right now?

53:49Well, if individuals at the moment are not good at maintaining their own passion, it means that there are fewer people doing the hard work than otherwise maybe would do this hard work. And on the other hand, is that organizations that are trying to tackle the tough challenges are also not getting the most out of their employees, right? That they're like contributing to the problem. So if we only fix this, if we develop the passion strategy for ourselves, and if we as organizational leaders develop passion strategies for our workforce, think of just how much more we could accomplish. Think of the differences that we could actually make.

54:29That's the aspirational ideal that drives me, that drives my research, and that I hope if people really get this and adopt this, I really think that we could make so much more out of ourselves. We could really start tackling and make progress on some of the biggest challenges that we face. And in fact, I think some of the reasons why we stall in our progress, in part has a variety of reasons. They're structural and so on. But I think one of the challenges why we fail to make progress is this passion problem. My final question is a more personal question about our own passion strategy and burnout.

55:05Talk about how those of us who are passionate but struggling can manage through and regain some of that fire. I'll start with the first challenge. I think the word burnout, I don't know, I'm going to be so academic about this stuff. But the word burnout is not a helpful word. I agree. And here's why. If you look at the academic literature, burnout actually has three components. So burnout can refer to emotional exhaustion. This is like when you're just feeling emotionally numb. Does that make sense? Like you don't have the emotional resources. But that's just one of three facets of burnout. The second facet of burnout is a loss of self-efficacy, meaning like you don't feel like you can do it anymore.

55:55Like you're not seeing progress. You don't see how the effort that you invest actually leads to tangible outcomes. This is, I think, the challenge that I fell into and one of the reasons why I burned out. Like I just didn't see the outcomes anymore and I started questioning everything. And then the third is cynicism. Cynicism meaning you don't believe that it's a good idea anymore. You start questioning the thing that you are passionate about. The problem is that when you're burned out, it can be any one of these three things or a combination of several of them. And that the answer to what you should do in order to stop the burnout and like come back is different depending on your underlying diagnosis of what's going on.

56:38If you are emotionally exhausted, so if you're feeling emotionally numb, then like a vacation or a reduction of working hours or a reduction of other work demands, those kinds of things can help. But if you're feeling a loss of self-efficacy, no vacation is going to fix that. That's for sure. If you're feeling a loss of self-efficacy, you need to start thinking about, or one of the things that can help is, can you break down some of the bigger goals that you're working on into smaller goals, right? Like, can you actually start thinking about how you might see more tangible progress? Are you able to reduce the distance between the work that you're doing and the outcome of the work?

57:21My colleague Ryan Buell has done amazing work on what he calls operational transparency, where rather than the supply chain being super opaque, you actually show the workers the outcomes of the work that they have, right? So imagine you're a chef and you work in the kitchen and you never see whether or not somebody actually likes your food. Well, that can be really challenging. But what if you actually created a kitchen where you can look at your diners, which has become very popular right now in many restaurants? Now, as the chef, I can see my diners enjoying their food. That creates operational transparency.

57:58And that can allow me, this is one of the things that you can do in addition to breaking down goals, that can allow me to gain a sense of self-efficacy. And obviously, maybe I just really lack skills right now. Great. Then maybe I need to go and upskill. But that can help address burnout. And then finally, cynicism. Again, no amount of vacation is going to address cynicism. No amount of upskilling is going to address cynicism. To address cynicism, you have to start thinking about what initially drew you to this thing. Like, why do you care about this? What is it that you find so important about this?

58:32And maybe you need to sit a little bit and try to understand, like, what about this has gone awry? Like, why do you think this is no longer a good idea? Why are you so skeptical? But the answers to those questions are very personal and there's no one size fits all answer. But that's very different than being burned out because you're emotionally exhausted or you feel a lack of self-efficacy. So I think the first thing that you need to do when you say, oh, I'm feeling burned out or when somebody, one of your employees says like, I'm feeling burned out is to say, hold on. You say that you're feeling burned out, but which one is it?

59:06Are you feeling emotionally exhausted? Are you feeling a loss of self-efficacy? Are you feeling cynical about what we're doing here? What you care about is a combination of these things? And then your answer to how to regain it has to depend on that diagnosis.

59:22That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Ahrens-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.