Vision + Passion = Buy In

One of my first events when I started my job was a training session for the Troy University Trojan Ambassadors. We brought in a representative to teach our new ambassadors about how to grab attention and give a memorable tour. To start off his presentation, we watched a TED Talk by Simon Sinek named “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” A big portion of the talk is about how successful leaders and organizations start with why. Sinek said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Most organizations or people do not follow this line of thinking. Most start with a product and are forced to work backwards and figure out why people should follow them or buy the product. From what I can tell, starting with the why shows passion. It shows that this product wasn’t just created to make money, but because the person who created it really believes that it was needed. It is their passion project.

In class this week, we read about the importance of leaders having vision. Leaders must be able to see where they or their organization will be in the future. But, it is just as important to have passion. . Merriam-Webster defines vision as “a thought, concept, or object formed by the imagination,” while passion is defined as “a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept.” Wendy Kopp had a vision of making schools better, but without making that vision her passion, she would not have been able to create Teach for America.

According to a blog post by CEO, author and speaker, Randy Grieser, “Passions inspires others to join and identify with your vision.” He says that organizations are limited because of a lack of passion, and not just having passion as a leader, but inspiring your employees to be passionate as well.

In my opinion, being passionate inspires passion. You need passionate employees to create buy-in and a more successful organization as a whole. According to an article from Forbes, people want to follow a passionate leader. If their leaders seem to not care where the company or organization is going in the future, they will not care to work as hard. This is something that I have had to learn in my position.

Like I said earlier, I work with our Trojan Ambassadors, who are student tour guides and campus representatives. The organization has gone through a lot of leadership changes over the last few years, and that has created instability within the group. Something that my coworker and I have been working on this last year is getting the Ambassadors to buy-in to the organization.

Grieser said, “To inspire passion in employees, leaders need to be vocal and excited about why the organization matters, and employees need to see that their leaders are passionate about this.” This is exactly what we did. With help from our upperclassmen, we have been able to change the culture surrounding our Ambassadors to something more exciting, and something that the members want to do, not have to. How did we do this? It was actually pretty easy.

To create buy-in within our organization, we created a vision of what we wanted to organization to look like, and we found some great upperclassmen who are extremely passionate about the organization to help up put this vision into action. We took a group of highly motivated students to a conference in Birmingham where they got to learn about other schools and their Ambassador groups. They learned how these groups were run and how they could be better leaders within the Trojan Ambassadors. When this group came back from the conference they were so fired up about the changes that we could make, but we were a little worried that it was just that summer camp mentality, and it would fade in a month. We are so lucky that it didn’t! My co-advisor and I sat down with the group and listened to what they took away from the conference. We implemented some of the easier changes immediately, changing our bylaws and our interview process. (We still have a lot of ideas, but they will take longer!) Because this group of upperclassmen are so passionate about the organization, they have created an environment of excitement that our new members have been brought in to. Now are new members are excited about the organization and have bought-in to the changes we are trying to make!

Something that I have learned throughout this process is that having good, passionate leadership does not only make the new members of our organization work harder, but it makes my job, and the jobs of our executive board easier because the new people are so excited!

I know this is an extremely simplified story, but just because it was working with a small organization of students does not mean that having passionate leaders won’t work for large companies too. The article on Forbes says that the passionate people are not working for the sake of “doing stuff,” they don’t try and look busy. The passionate people are learning about the world around them and how they can make it better!

Is it important for leaders to have a vision? Yes, absolutely, but, I think it is just as important for those leaders to be passionate about the vision so it can be put in to action! It also takes a leader who is outwardly passionate about their vision to get employees to buy-in to the vision, and work harder!

Greiser, R. (2017, February 12). Why Passionate Leadership Matters. Retrieved from https://theodinaryleader.com/why-passionate-leadership-matters/

Mogan, N. (2015, July 08). The Art of Passionate Leadership. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellevate/2015/07/08/the-art-of-passionate-leadership/#d6f87314484d

Passion. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.merriam-wester.com/dictionary/passion

Sinek, S. How Great Leaders Inspire Action. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talk/simon_sinek_how_great_leades_inspire_action/detail?language=en

Vision. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vision