The dangers of “passion.” Companies (especially startups) love hiring passionate people. They’re engaging and they really believe what they do. If you’re going to surround yourself all day with people it makes sense. Nothing but wins, right?
Passionate people are like resistors. They can generate a lot of heat. There’s a problem, they throw themselves at it, work is accomplished and you get some heat. If you start packing them together without a plan or organization, it will quickly turn into waste heat. The desire to stay busy resulting in the wrong things getting done. Long and intense arguments about what’s the right thing to be working on or what’s the right approach. Bike shedding [1] for instance, is almost always a problem of misdirected passions. Sometimes people are super passionate about “work” itself and will find ways to fill 12 hours at a time regardless if that makes sense (sometimes manufacturing busy work and sometimes it’s perfectionism). And the biggest of all: burnout.
Passionate people are exceptionally good at burning out. There’s usually two major ways this happens. The first, they just do so much work and generate so much heat they melt. We let this happen because work is “virtuous” and they produce “value” at their personal expense and nobody told them to stop. It’s not sustainable. Startups thrive on this misunderstanding. The second, and more pernicious, is value misalignment or “moral distress.” That passion has to come from somewhere. For intrinsically motivated people it’s because the work appeals to their internal value system. You got them onboard, they love the mission, everything is rosy… and then the company does something to demonstrate that the company values don’t line up with their personal values. An easy example: the company said “we value technical craftsmanship” and then a feature was going to take an extra few week or two to be done well and management said “unacceptable, this has to be out Tuesday.” This kind of system shock results in an immediate “wait, why am I putting this kind of energy in? Turns out this is Just Another Company that doesn’t care.” Your highest performers can be disillusioned in the span of an afternoon. When people believe they’re working outside of their value system, or they’ve been lied to, even small tasks suddenly require almost all their capacity. Once this happens and you expect them to perform at their previous level, without fixing the underlying mismatch, it’s just a matter of time until they leave or collapse.
[1] Arguing about what color to paint the bike shed. You’ve already agreed on the useful thing to be done (build the shed), now you’re just arguing about what color to paint it.
