When leaders tell their teams to “find their passion,” they think they’re being inspiring. One pattern I’ve noticed is that this advice — however well-intentioned — actually makes high performance harder, not easier.
Here’s why it matters. Passion is reactive. It spikes when things are novel and interesting, and fades when the work gets hard, repetitive, or unglamorous. Purpose, on the other hand, is generative. It persists precisely when conditions get difficult — because it isn’t dependent on how the work feels in the moment.
The Problem with Passion as a Leadership Model
The “follow your passion” narrative has been handed down through graduation speeches and leadership retreats for decades. And it 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 is fragile. It depends on stimulation, novelty, and the feeling of momentum. The moment a high-performing team member 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 — not just to the individual, but to the people they serve, the team they’re part of, the organization they’re building. Purpose holds when passion can’t.
Research in organizational psychology consistently supports this distinction. People who report high levels of meaning and purpose in their work demonstrate greater resilience, higher intrinsic motivation, and significantly better performance on complex tasks than those who report passion or excitement as their primary driver (Dik and Duffy 2012). The difference isn’t subtle — it’s structural.
What Leaders Actually Control
Here’s where this becomes an advisory conversation rather than a philosophical one. Leaders can’t give people passion. Passion 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.
The sequence matters: Clarity → Alignment → Strategy → Execution. Purpose lives at the Clarity layer. When it’s missing — or when it’s been articulated in language so generic it means nothing (“we create value for all stakeholders”) — the whole sequence becomes unstable.
Most leaders I work with have a purpose statement. Very few have a purpose that is 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. A 2008 study at Shaare Zedek Medical Center illustrated this with unusual precision: when radiologists were shown a photograph of the patient whose CT scan they were interpreting, the number of incidental findings approximately doubled, and every radiologist reported feeling more empathy toward the patient — with no other change to their process. One face. That was it. The principle scales directly to leadership: customer stories in team meetings, time spent with the people the organization actually serves, a profile of who is on the receiving end of the work. Purpose doesn’t live in the strategy deck. It lives in the moment when an employee understands exactly who their work is for.
Purpose Versus Passion in Practice
The practical distinction shows up clearly when things go wrong.
A team running on passion will fragment when a major initiative fails, a key leader exits, or the organization enters a difficult period. The emotional fuel that was holding them together runs dry precisely when they need it most.
A team running on purpose will have a reference point. The hard period gets contextualized — it’s difficult, but it’s in service of something that still matters. Purpose creates the narrative frame that allows people to stay when staying is hard.
I see this in advisory work constantly. Organizations with strong, specific, internalized purpose have higher tolerance for the ambiguity that growth and transformation require. Organizations that have substituted culture perks, enthusiasm, or charismatic leadership for a clear sense of purpose tend to be brittle — high performance when conditions are good, fragile when they’re not.
The Question Leaders Should Be Asking
The real question isn’t “are my people passionate about their work?” It’s “do my people understand why this work matters, and do they believe it?”
The first question is about emotion. The second is about meaning. They’re related, but they’re not the same — and confusing them leads to leadership strategies that optimize for the wrong thing.
If you’re not sure which one your organization has built its culture on, here’s 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.
References
Dik, Bryan J., and Ryan D. Duffy. 2012. Make Your Job a Calling: How the Psychology of Vocation Can Change Your Life and Your Work. West Conshohocken: Templeton Press.
Turner, Yehonatan N., and Irith Hadas-Halpern. 2008. “The Effects of Including a Patient’s Photograph to the Radiographic Examination.” Presented at the 94th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, Chicago, December 2.