This week I want to share just a quick little thought that I think you will find interesting. I wrote a short essay for school that answered a question as to which was better when hiring a new team member: Someone competent but uninterested, or, someone passionate but not yet with the skills and experience to do the job. My answer took the thought in an entirely different direction. Here it is.
We know that being considered competent is extremely important. Having a solid foundation of expert power gives one credibility (Yukl, 2006), but, at the same time, people desire to follow a leader of passion, one who wants to make a difference (Kouzes & Posner, 2012). So, which is more important: competence or passion? If someone has competence but doesn’t care, would people follow them? If one cares deeply, but lacks the knowledge and skills to do the job, should people follow? This is a question that is important when assessing who is the best candidate for a cross-cultural position.
Dunn, Lafferty, and Alford (2012) identify the ability to develop talent as a critical skill in global leadership, which McCall and Hollenbeck (2002) frame as the organization’s responsibility to provide cross-cultural experiences in order to continually add to an executive’s “repertoire of knowledge and skills” (Bird & Mendenhall, 2016, p. 117). Bandura (1977) refers to this practice as social learning theory, which facilitates learning and development through engagement with one’s surroundings. Each of these suggests that competency can be learned. Passion, on the other hand, may be more difficult, because while some theorists believe that passion can be developed, much discussion deals with the fact that it takes a considerable amount of effort and time to do so (Chen, Ellsworth, & Schwarz, 2015).
The answer requires some fresh thought (Miska & Öner, 2015), so I propose an alternative. Caligiuri (2012) describes curiosity as an important characteristic of a potential global leader. Cabrera and Unruh (2012) state that curiosity should be “endless” and part of the “concrete knowledge and understanding of the global environment.” Curiosity applies to both competence and passion. Without it, knowledge that leads to competence would not occur, and a passionate person would naturally want to know everything they could about their task at hand. So, the answer to which comes first, competence or passion, is neither. Curiosity must come first.
Lead well.