Stop Telling Your Team to Find Their Passion

By Naomi Withers | Vancouver City News | August 19, 2026
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When leaders tell their teams to "find their passion," they think they're being inspiring. One recurring thing I've noticed is that this advice, however well-intentioned, actually makes high performance harder.

Here's why. Passion is reactive. It spikes when things are novel and interesting, and fades when the work gets hard, repetitive, or unglamorous. Purpose is generative. It persists precisely when conditions get difficult, because it isn't dependent on how the work feels in the moment.

Where the passion model breaks

The "follow your passion" narrative contains a real insight: meaningful work matters. People who find their work meaningful outperform those who don't, stay longer, and bring more of their capability to the table.

But the model breaks when you look at how passion actually behaves inside organizations. Passion depends on stimulation, novelty, and the feeling of momentum. The moment a high performer hits a difficult quarter, a frustrating stakeholder, or a project that requires months of unglamorous execution, passion doesn't sustain them. Something else has to.

Purpose does that work. Purpose is the answer to why this matters, to the people they serve, the team they're part of, the organization they're building. Purpose holds when passion can't.

The research supports the distinction. People who report high levels of meaning and purpose in their work show greater resilience, higher intrinsic motivation, and better performance on complex tasks than those whose primary driver is excitement.

What leaders actually control

Leaders can't give people passion. It is internal, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable. But leaders can build the conditions for purpose.

Purpose at the organizational level requires clarity about why the organization exists, who it serves, and what it's optimizing for. This is the work most leadership teams skip. They build strategy before they've built shared clarity about purpose, and then wonder why execution feels like pushing rope.

Most leaders I work with have a purpose statement. Very few have a purpose specific enough to make decisions with. And the gap between the stated purpose and the lived one is often a visibility problem: employees can't connect to a customer they've never encountered.

One study made this vivid. When radiologists were shown a photograph of the patient whose CT scan they were reading, incidental findings roughly doubled, and every radiologist reported feeling more empathy toward the patient. One face. No other change to the process. The principle scales directly: customer stories in team meetings, time spent with the people the organization serves, a clear picture of who is on the receiving end of the work.

A useful diagnostic

Ask three people at different levels of your organization why the work matters. Not what the work is, or what the goal is. Why it matters.

If the answers are inconsistent, vague, or mirror the language on the website rather than language earned through experience, that's a clarity problem, not a passion problem.

Purpose doesn't come from a rebrand or an offsite. It comes from leaders who can answer the question honestly themselves, and who build the conditions for that answer to become shared.

That's the work. And it starts well before strategy.

Adapted from an article first published on the Growth Consultant Services blog: The Passion Trap

By Naomi Withers | Vancouver City News

Naomi Withers is the founder of Growth Consultant Services, where she advises founders, CEOs, and executive teams at mid-market organizations on AI strategy, executive coaching, and high-performance leadership. She writes at growthconsultantservices.com.

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Tags: #Artificial Intelligence #AI Strategy #Executive Leadership #Business with Purpose #Naomi Withers #Growth Consultant Services #Vancouver City News