Field Notes

Leaders search for and revere ambitious people. 

The drive to achieve prized outcomes is an intangible that leaders can’t collect enough of. They know that without team members who possess a significant measure of ambition, achieving extraordinary team goals will be immensely more difficult. 

So, they select, encourage, and reward those who display the ambition to push and stretch themselves to accomplish challenging goals. 

Leaders appreciate that nearly everyone on the team and in the organization has at least a modicum of ambition. The basic drive to pursue happiness, achieve financial security, and produce quality outcomes is commonly shared. 

But leaders look for those who possess an even higher level of ambition. The kind of ambition that makes them relentless, indefatigable, and driven to accomplish great things.  

Although highly ambitious team members can sometimes act too much in their own self-interest, as a rule, leaders prefer ambitious teammates because they know how critical they are to keep the trains moving toward success. 

Unfortunately for leaders, such ambitious people are in short supply. 

People truly driven to achieve and succeed are a product of an unusual collection of factors, such as family upbringing, exposure to ambitious role models, achievement satisfaction, and the desire to overcome personal misfortune. 

Ambition is typically cultivated in the formative years and is tremendously hard to predict. 

To make finding ambitious team members even harder is the prevalence of a threshold or contentment point that limits the ambition of even high achievers. 

Most team members are relatively ambitious—up to a point. The majority have a threshold or contentment point where they no longer need to attain more. 

Once a team member is satisfied with their achievements (and income or financial stability), they often lose the motivation to keep driving themselves toward more. 

It’s not that they lose their ambition as much as it is that they throttle back their effort in the workplace so they can spend more time pursuing other interests and passions. 

But a rare group of people never reach this point or threshold no matter how much they achieve or get compensated. 

Their ambition is directly tied to their self-esteem, and they seem to feel even better about themselves with every successive achievement.

They climb the ladder not for accolades or rewards, but for the personal satisfaction they receive when they achieve. 

Money and other incentives they gather along the way represent a score regarding this satisfaction and usually little more. Achievement becomes the narcotic that drives their lives. 

With even one or two such ambitious team members, a team can be propelled to greatness under the guidance of an equally ambitious leader. It’s the secret sauce of so many high-performing teams, yet it is incredibly hard to manufacture on purpose. 

That’s why good leaders are always on the hunt for the next talented and highly ambitious team member. They know they can never gather enough of them.