WEW 29 - The Dangers of Dispassionate Work

Last week we talked about the opportunity of passion as it relates to work but what about the other side? Dispassionate work?

Dispassionate work is a shoulder shrug of indifference on the way to picking up a paycheck. A dispassionate employee is holding a headcount that could be used by a motivated individual who could have a positive impact and who could be positively impacted by the job.

So what is dispassionate work?

Dispassionate work (different from a Dispassionate person) is the result of effort or labor attended with little care. This often means that it's full of mistakes (bugs in the software world) or delivered well beyond the date it was committed to. It can also be work that gets deferred or delayed even starting.

While these symptoms can manifest from other causes, you know it's dispassionate work when the person responsible shows little or no concern when you bring up these areas for improvement.

An Anecdote

The lead engineer for the presentation layer of a website I was working on was woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call. It was me on the other line.

Lead: "Hey, what's up?"

William: "Hey, sorry to wake you, there is some error causing the homepage not to load and you didn't respond to the pager."

Lead: "It's probably the server or backend my code is good."

William: "Can you join in on a call and help us make sure?"

Lead: "It's definitely not me, I'll check my side in the morning"

*Click*

There is much to dig into in the above regarding accountability, strength, and empathy. Today let's focus on the Passion component though. This lead clearly had confidence in the code they wrote but they also had no relationship to the product we were building. The site being down wasn't something that concerned them, there was no drive to make sure it worked. They were indifferent.

How to address a Dispassionate worker

If a member of your team does good work but is dispassionate about it, it's a missed opportunity for the business. It's also hard to address. From the anecdote above, that person and their team DID write good code and they were even right: the error wasn't caused by anything they did or wrote.

However, their unwillingness to join in the call and be a part of something bigger than them negatively impacted the organization's morale. The other leaders grew to resent this person as not pulling their own weight, among other things.

To coach a person in this position you need to give specific feedback on expectations and misses. You can't fault someone for how you feel they feel about work.

In the above, I set the new expectation shortly afterward that if there is a major outage (the site or a part of the site failing completely) all leads were expected to join the triage call or to have a representative in the on-call rotation attend. All disciplines are represented. This model doesn't make sense for every business but I felt it was right for the maturity of this product.

How did the lead above respond to that and a couple of other changes? I didn't even have time to coach them, as soon as it became apparent that I was building a culture of accountability their lack of interest led them to find their own way out. About a month after I started setting these expectations, that person resigned.

So?

Dispassionate work is something that bothers me profoundly. There are so many talented people vying for jobs, I don't have much patience for someone who doesn't want to do what they are doing. I also believe that passion comes in many forms.

In the anecdote above, if that team lead cared about how the site reflected on them, the company's mission, their relationship with their peers, or the example they were setting for junior team members, I feel they would have been more on top of things. I feel the company would have been more successful and I even feel they could have avoided more late-night calls by working to find ways to make us better and more resilient.

Passion starts with recruiting, is awoken through empathy, and leads to accountability. It's the start of my value system PASTE (Passion Accountability Strength Transparency Empathy). It is hard to spark and impossible to create from nothing, but it fuels progress in all things.

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