I think the following is going to make for a great jumping-off point for some insightful discussion on a topic that's kind of the "chicken or egg" equivalent of the business world...

Check out this quote from Roy Vallee, Chairman and CEO of Fortune 500 company Avnet, Inc., a distributor of electronic parts, enterprise computing and storage products, as captured by Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business:

When I became a sales manager, for the first time in my life, I spent some time thinking about how do I -- how do I motivate these folks, so this is a more focused, sort of tactical view of employee motivation.  What I figured out was that it wasn't my job to install a fire in their belly, so to speak.  In fact, most of them already had that fire in the belly.  What they needed from me was two things: one, clarity of the work that I wanted them to do, or what it is I wanted them to accomplish; and two, they wanted me to remove the obstacles that were beyond their personal control.  So if there were issues in other parts of the company that needed attention by management, that had to be my job.  Their job was to achieve the things that I had specifically asked them to go do.  I found that that little simple two-step process works pretty well.

When the article that the Carey School did on Vallee was picked up by SmartBrief on Leadership, the headline was "The best leaders focus on practicalities, not passion."

With small businesses asking employees – especially managers – to multitask more and more, as they do more with less, the least leaders can do in return is to strike a balance between being passionate and practical.  In other words, don't abandon the passion that attracted you to found, co-found, or join the company in the first place.

Through the years we have heard from some of the most successful small businesses that a large part of their competitive advantage in employee engagement and team building comes from having a passionate leader who views creating a powerful, unique workplace culture as job one.  Many of the leaders I'm referring to are on this Top 10 list I recently assembled.

My bottom line is this: Employees – again, especially pivotal managers – already equate so much of business as being about numbers.  Prospective hires need to score well enough on their skills and/or emotional tests, and often in a team vote, to get the job.  Current employees need to hit their target metrics to grow their responsibilities and have the potential to increase their wages.  Managers need to continually assess, based on these numbers, who's on their "A" team.

Therefore, if you have a leader who is also all about the numbers and little or nothing else, providing job clarity and removing their obstacles for success, as Vallee advocates, will still leave some employees feeling hollow and, thus, not as motivated as they can be to make the innovative contributions necessary for a truly productive workplace.

Agree with me?  Disagree?  Let me know in the comments below.