Personal Ambition
Finding a sweet spot
Like many aspects of our personalities, ambition is admirable up to a certain point but then can tip over into being destructive. Literature and history are replete with examples: MacBeth, Dr. Faustus, Captain Ahab, the Great Gatsby, Dr. Frankenstein, Icarus, Napoleon, and Elizabeth Holmes, to name a few. We have been warned; and yet, why is it so hard to hold up a mirror to see what others so clearly see?
Francis Bacon wrote that ambition must be guided and moderated; restrained ambition, as he described it, fuels progress while excessive ambition leads to instability. Aristotle felt that too little ambition would result in stagnation while too much was evidence of hubris. Nietzsche said that positive ambition is required to overcome one’s limitations while negative ambition was directed toward seeking to dominate others. Clearly, this topic has been on our collective minds for some time.
In business, we associate ambition with the drive to succeed, until it gets out of hand. Ambition is fundamental to setting bold visions and taking risks that have the potential to be game-changing. Boards would never choose a leader who was reputed to be low in ambition, for fear that problems wouldn’t be addressed or opportunities not seized upon. Ambition, in its constructive state, can be inspiring. Leaders with ambition are able to fire up the troops and get people to do things they didn’t know they could do on behalf of the organization or greater good.
At the same time, boards steer clear of CEO candidates who in the past exhibited reckless behavior, stepped on their peers to get ahead, or abused their people in order to achieve goals that would reflect favorably on themselves. In my experience, leaders who have allowed their ambition to grow to the point that it derails them are often surprised, believing they have done nothing wrong except perhaps to care too deeply. In the heat of battle, maintaining perspective can be difficult. Ambition is necessary to make progress. Often, leaders are praised at first for their efforts, which reinforces their belief that leading through ambition is working for them. If a little is good, more must be better. Until it isn’t.
Here’s some of what science tells us about what’s going on with ambition and why it’s so hard to spot the negative effects of ambition in ourselves.
Large 360-degree feedback studies find that more ambitious leaders rate themselves more highly in motivating others, assuming accountability and assuming a growth orientation, which are all good things. However, their peers and subordinates don’t agree with their self-assessments, nor do they rate them as more effective than less ambitious leaders. Since ambitious individuals are more likely to pursue leadership positions, we find leadership roles largely occupied by people with outsized opinions of themselves while other equally or even more capable individuals remain on the sidelines.
In a Stanford study by Francis Flynn and his colleagues, ambitious leaders were found to be 4-10 times more likely to see themselves as above average compared with their less ambitious peers, regardless of gender. Holding this view reduces receptivity to feedback and can lead to excessive overconfidence.
Being told that one is a “high potential” leader increases ambition while being told that one is “low potential” does the opposite. Therefore, we know that growing ambition isn’t just the result of one’s personality; people are susceptible to the messages they receive from others about themselves. Positive reinforcement of any behavior, as we know, encourages more and more of the same.
Ambition in leaders is consistently linked to a higher risk of unethical behavior, especially when large rewards, status and power are at stake – exactly the spoils for reaching a C-suite or CEO position. When motivated by extrinsic rewards rather than an internal need to fulfill one’s potential, individuals demonstrate more political behavior, are more likely to misrepresent their credentials, and take ethical shortcuts. Extrinsically motivated leaders are more likely to rationalize the need to bend the rules or cut corners to achieve outcomes by which they are measured.
As a result of their own excessive ambition, leaders set unreasonable goals for others, causing them to adopt behaviors they would not normally exhibit, such as falsifying their actual achievements, hiding problems they encounter, or engaging in internal competition. Too much ambition can thereby poison the culture of the organization, instilling guilt and mistrust. Cheating on the part of subordinates is most pronounced when people identify strongly with an ambitious leader and don’t want to disappoint them.
Crossing the line from healthy to unhealthy ambition is easy to do because ambitious individuals seek positions of authority to begin with, are reinforced for their bold behavior along the way, and with continued success, develop overly inflated opinions of themselves while also becoming immune to feedback. That makes looking into the mirror and seeing an objective reflection difficult.
The only hope for course correction is that someone the person trusts breaks through their wall of hubris to help them recalibrate their approach. When you think about Captain Ahab, Napoleon, General George Armstrong Custer and Richard Nixon, it wasn’t that people didn’t try to tell them; it’s that they wouldn’t listen. Their most trusted advisors wanted nothing more than to save them, but they could not. Perhaps, like Icarus, the appeal of flying into the sun was simply too great to allow anything to interfere, regardless of the ultimate consequences. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to accept being ordinary after putting so much into convincing oneself and others of your exceptionality.
We should never forsake ambition because ambition enables us to make the most of the opportunities we are given in life. But we should also recognize that like a powerful drug, once we experience the benefits of being ambitious, we may not be able to stop, at least on our own. By cultivating the habit of being open to feedback and actively seeking it, starting at the earliest stages of our careers, we can build an immunity to self-deception that often clouds the ways we see ourselves. As Shakespeare’s Polonius asserts to his son Laertes in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” But first make certain you know who thine own self really is.