Passion, Craft, and Career Advancement

I’ve managed my small team at Zello for a smidge over two and a half years. I entered the position with two reports who I’d helped interview, added three in my time as manager, and am now backfilling one. Depending on the week and the work at hand, anywhere between a fourth to a half of my time is still spent on IC work.

I was originally unsure whether I wanted to pursue management.^[1] While I’m still unsure, I realized that this position would allow me to increase Design’s impact while continuing my craft in minutiae and at a new, larger scale. A team can do more than an individual, and a skilled coordinator can further enable. And, it’s a new challenge. Signed Wil Nichols, LinkedInfuencer.

So I used to be an IC, and now I’m not. I was motivated by building things and the craft that builds things. Before managing, I found that mentoring and training juniors was rewarding. Nowadays, my team is a mix of early-career folks who can be mentored, and mid- to later-career designers whose work can be further enabled. Both are good. I’m interested in helping designers—regardless of career stage—do better work.

My team’s appreciation for craft prompts them to seek out new opportunities to both impact the company and broaden their skillset. Their love for design, art, and its application drives them to do more, do more differently, and reintegrate new skills back into the day-to-day. I set them up for new opportunity, helping in craft where necessary and otherwise seeking out new opportunities to apply their skills.

I’m fortunate to work with these highly talented, ambitious folks. Their success is largely driven by these characteristics which give me a springboard to further their success. I’m lucky to work with such a passionate team—I didn’t build their passion; they brought it to the table—and so I worry that passion doesn’t scale.

I don’t expect a design applicant to be Online Designer Sebastian Tran van Schneider.^[2] I also don’t expect design applicants to be me—there are benefits and detriments to self-starting a career at a young age,^[3] but expecting to find that baseline is unrealistic. Still, we seek passionate self-starters. Without that springboard, I’m at a loss for how to motivate and develop a career.

Does passion predicate career success, particularly in one’s early career? To what extent can passion variegate and therefore facilitate diverse hiring? How can I recognize passion’s broader shape, and can we reliably recognize passion different from our own?

I admire and relate to passion, but passion for work to the exclusion of other interests is detrimental. We seek to work with human beings, not single-purpose tools.^[4] Can we reliably recognize a healthy mélange of professional passion, hobbies, and other interests, and how do those signals change with career stage?

My own background paints design as a framework encompassing many disciplines and interests, but I often find that’s not the case for others. Where one isn’t intrinsically motivated to further their field of work, is that indifference, and can one succeed with that mindset?

I want the best for my team, and where individuals realize that design isn’t their passion, I don’t know how to help them grow or progress. Can growth be motivated without passion, or will passionless work always lead to inertia and stagnation? When the team or employer need more, how can that reconcile with inertia?