Is your company a reflection of your passion?

I believe there is a direct link between passion and success in business. I find that business owners and salespeople who are passionate about their lives are more successful in their business ventures than those who aren't. Why? Because they automatically apply more energy and discipline to their daily behavior, they don't just go through the motions.

Last week, I received a phone call from a local business owner who began by saying, "I would like to meet with you to discuss my salespeople, they are woefully short of hitting their quarterly quota and it will soon be over." After asking a few qualifying questions, I agreed to meet with him to analyze his developmental needs. I was able to quickly determine the root of his sales problem, the sales shortfall was created by an ineffective mixture of motivation and habit. In order to delve more deeply into this challenge, besides interviewing the owner, I wanted to talk to those occupying four other key positions: the receptionist and the sales, operations and customer service managers. Passion, I believe, is a key to high-performing cultures, I wanted to access their passion level and its impact on company results.

As I interviewed the receptionist, I observed someone who just "went through the motions" when she answered the phone. This was an easy diagnosis for me as her irritation with having to sort invoices as she picked it up was painfully obvious to me and, probably, the callers.

The sales manager, in position for seven years, was resigned to accepting mediocrity from his sales team. I received the same response to every question I asked, "We tried that and it didn't work." He excelled at one thing only, exonerating himself of any responsibility by blaming his employees for poor results.

The operations manager was at war with the sales force. He claimed they made unrealistic delivery demands on his people and felt the company should eliminate salespeople, and sell on line.

To the service manager, customers were her biggest problem. She half-jokingly said, "My world would be a lot easier if we didn't have to service their needs." She proudly exclaimed she set the quality service standards ... not the customers.

Lastly, I reinterviewed the business owner. He shared he was tired of dealing with the poor results his company experienced. Although he had thought about selling the business and letting someone else deal with the headaches, he seemed willing to give it one more chance.

The four-hour interview led to my turning down the opportunity to work in this "paradise." The visual I had in my mind throughout it was of a dying patient lying on an operating room gurney. The doctor stood over him with a defibrillator in hand and yelled, "Clear." There was clearly a sales issue, but the owner was unable to see that the core challenge was the lack of passion his key players exhibited.

Energy is the driver of passion and each of us can control the quantity we put into our lives. In an automobile, the transmission converts the power of the engine into the force that moves the auto. High performers recognize the need to bring energy, enthusiasm and drive to the workplace as it's the extra gear in the transmission that propels them ahead of their competitors.

Passion transforms motivation into habit. Before you get out of bed in the morning, evaluate the level of passion you will carry forth into the day on a scale 10 high, 1 low. If it's below 7, you have unwittingly become the problem. By the way, if you give yourself a 6, you're really a 2 as no one ever self-scores under a 6.

This is America and you have the power to achieve almost anything you commit to accomplishing, including greater passion. Go conquer your worlds.

• Bill Bartlett owns Corporate Strategies, A Sandler Training Center. bbartlett@sandler.com.

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