I was searching for passion+leadership yesterday, and came across B. Scott Berkett’s Mornin’ Cup on Passion as a Competitive Tool. Looking for a common theme between the ‘great teams’ in his career, he determined that they all had great people. On each great team, there were people who demonstrated great leadership. What was the catalyst for that leadership? Passion.

This resonated with me instantly. In our Leadership session at school last week, we dicsussed whether leaders were born or made. There were good examples to support both extremes and, of course, plenty of room in the middle. Many people held up Ghandi as an example of a ‘born leader’, but I argued that much of his leadership had been learned, not the least of which through his legal education where he would have learned the law and how to be a persuasive orator (he was a successful lawyer, not a poor peasant). I proposed that the thing that made leaders great was passion. It was Ghandi’s passion for justice that compelled him to stand up against oppression and his passion for peace that focused him on doing so in a non-violent way.

Unfortunately, passion doesn’t seem to be enough. If Ghandi had been born in 1980 with the same passions, he would likely be a successful lawyer but it is unlikely that he would be a near-universal symbol of leadership. The context of social injustice was what triggered his passion and allowed him to rise up and lead a nation.

So what do you do when you don’t have passion for the task or organization at hand? Passion isn’t just something you can create, and it’s certainly not something you can fake. This exercise wasn’t helping the funk I was in...

Fortunately, Scott’s post had a link to Passion Catalyst by Curt Rosengren, which looks interesting and may expose some hidden passion I didn’t know I had, or relate my passions to my current situation in ways I hadn’t thought of before. I’ll let you know what I find. If you have any other recommendations for finding your passion, please share them in the comments.