Be a Red Hatter. Ignite passion and performance.

I was listening to a B2B branding talk with several panelist sharing on lessons learned, best practices and I recall the Red Hat Marketing leader saying that her job is easy- all she needs to do is work with what they already have intrinsic in the company culture- passion.

This sparked my interest to learn more, so I read The Open Organization. The author, Jim Whitehurst, was Red Hat CEO from 2007 to 2019 and is now IBM CEO after the acquisition of the company. Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions using a community-powered approach.”

I would not be able to do justice trying here to capture all Jim’s Leadership Tips that he provides at the end of every chapter. But there is ONE I want to circle back to- passion, which is introduced in the chapter called “Rethinking the Role of Emotion in the Workplace”.

Jim points to the fact that conventional management theory is based on simplifying assumptions in which the theorists “stripped any kind of emotion and irrationality from the equation in order to make their models work- they needed people to act like cogs in a wheel, simply as inputs to a system that would create outputs”. He points out that this thinking is similar to the early economics models built on assumptions that people behave rationally. Thinking here is evolving and created the new field of study called behavior economics., Jim goes on to say that the “business needs to evolve to take this into account as well”.

“Inspiration, enthusiasm, motivation, excitement are emotions. The question becomes- do you really want employees to check out their emotions at the door? The short answer is no. As a leader, you should be working very intentionally to spark as much emotion and passion as you can among your team rather than worrying about running the kinds of conventional management studies that try to measure how hard or fast people are working. While that form of management style may have worked well when workers tackled rote tasks like turning screwdrivers and working on assembly lines, it’s completely irrelevant to modern workers.” 

New models of organization were discussed in my MBA days, almost twenty years ago. I wonder- why we aren’t further along in this transformation? But this is where Jim’s authenticity offers a potential answer – “the challenge for leaders is that – unlike financial planning, capital budgeting, or organization structure- there is no real managing theory created to build, leverage and measure passion among workers and other members of the participative community”. And the foreword by Gary Hamel , visiting professor, London Business School provides solid context: “The human capabilities that are most critical to success- the ones that can help your organization become more resilient, more creative, more, well, awesome, - are precisely the ones that can’t be “managed”. While you can compel financially dependent employees to be obedient and diligent, and can recruit the most intellectually capable, you can’t command initiative, creativity or passion. These human capabilities are, quite literally, gifts. Every day, employees choose whether to bring them to work or leave them home. As a leader, how do you create an environment that inspires people to volunteer those “gifts”? “

As Jim points out, “Passion is contagious- begin to personally display emotions and others will follow”. For me, I now have a Red Hat sticky note on my PC monitor that reminds me to “Be a Red Hatter” because when I bring my “gift of passion” to my work, my productivity goes up and I am having more fun!.

BIO: Gallup’s top 5 CliftonStrengths: Learner. Achiever. Innovator. Responsible. Positivity. Under the mantra of “be the change you want to see in the world”, my goal here is to raise awareness of the invisible yet powerful team culture and inspire others to join in.