Teddy Eddy

My daughter was given charge of the class teddy last week and became completely engrossed with him. He was part of nearly every sentence – Teddy Eddy this, Teddy Eddy that. They were instantly joined at the hip: at the dinner table, in the bathroom, washing hands, cleaning teeth, bedtime story and, of course, in bed itself.

This OTT passion was completely out of the blue and somewhat overwhelming. You honestly couldn’t hold a winning lottery ticket with more fervour than she did with this scruffy bear.

Seeing it, I was reminded of meeting an excellent facilitator, Pammy Johal of Backbone. Pammy is a captivating individual and exactly the sort of person you’d want to be stuck in a lift with. Our conversations have run into cycling. She’s confessed she’s mad on her four bikes; they’re her babies.

To calibrate her self-proclaimed madness she told me about her selling an old Trek bike. She bumped into the lady that bought this bike from her a couple of years later in the supermarket. “How are you enjoying the bike?” Pammy asked. “Dunno really. It’s at my sister’s. I think it’s in her shed,” came the unwelcome reply.

Pammy was so desperate for her (former) bike – her offspring – to be with a family that loved her, she wrote the lady a cheque there and then to buy the bike back for the original sale price. The beloved Trek was repatriated.

Yes, these are two extreme examples of passion but what if you could get your teams feeling and acting 10% of that level toward your products, your services, your clients? What would 50% look like?

Drucker’s infamous dictum goes along the lines of, ‘Business is all about finding and retaining customers.’ A fraction of the passion shown above would have your clients returning every time – the trouble is fostering it certainly isn’t child’s play.

How are you enabling your team to be passionate?