Episode #156: Managing Your Ambition
Don’t win, only to lose
I recently came across a new book called Return on Ambition: A Radical Approach to Your Achievement, Growth, and Well-Being.
The book exposes a study on ambitious people, in which over half of those interviewed felt as though they’d sacrificed too much to get to where they were, and didn’t feel as though the rewards were commensurate with their effort and sacrifice.
This got me thinking about my own ambition, and how I felt about my career achievements and the energy it took to fulfil them. Sure, nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice, but how do you know in advance whether or not you’ll find those sacrifices were worth it when you look back in 10 or 20 years’ time?
Everyone is different when it comes to their personal drivers and goals, but in this episode I give four key insights that you might find useful in deciding where you truly want your ambition to take you!
MANAGING YOUR AMBITION
EPISODE #156 TRANSCRIPT
I recently came across an article on the McKinsey website about a new book called 'Return on Ambition', a radical approach to your achievement, growth and wellbeing. The book is authored by two gentlemen, Nicolai Tillisch and Nicolai Chen Nielsen. For ease of reference, I'm going to refer to the author of the book simply as Nikolai so that I can cover both bases.
In this book, Nikolai exposes a study on ambitious people, in which over half of those interviewed, felt as though they'd sacrificed too much to get to where they were. And they didn't feel as though the rewards were commensurate with their effort and sacrifice.
This got me to thinking about my own ambition and how I thought about my career achievements and the energy it took to achieve them.
Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice, but how do you know in advance whether or not you'll find those sacrifices were worth it when you look back in 10 or 20 years time?
Everyone is different when it comes to their personal drivers and ambition, but there are a couple of insights here that you might find particularly useful, especially if you're a little younger than I am, and you still have loads of time to do something about it.
I'm going to start with an overview of the concepts from the book, 'Return on Ambition'.
I'll then talk about how ambition factors into performance.
I'll finish with reflection on my own achievements, ambition, and sacrifice to give you a no-holds-barred perspective that you'll undoubtedly find useful in navigating your own path.
If you're reading this, you are ambitious by definition
You're putting time, energy, and effort into trying to improve yourself and your leadership capability. You're already in the top few percentage points of the people you work with.
This is an entirely positive thing, so don't allow yourself to be misled by people who tell you that ambition is bad or undesirable. It will fuel your life in an incredibly positive way if you can learn to temperate it.
The premise of the book, 'Return on Ambition' is that too many people are working too hard without becoming as successful as they could be. So what does as successful as they could be mean?
There's a fairly recent podcast episode that you may find useful in this context, and I'd really recommend that you go back and have a listen to it, even if you've heard it before. It’s Episode #138: It's Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know.
The reason that this is such an important episode is that I actually talk about the ecosystem that's required to build a successful career. I also give 10 key areas where you need to build capability in order to optimise your potential.
Before you start thinking about the concept of being as successful as you could be, at least acknowledge what that truly takes, and don't wonder why you aren't rising faster. Otherwise, your misdirected ambition may be very much diluted by putting all your energy into the wrong places.
In the book, Nicolai's definition of ambition is this; "a powerful yearning and drive to attain a future state that's different to today and challenging to reach". And he's come up with a really simple equation that I love, "return on ambition equals achievement, plus growth, plus wellbeing".
These three factors are interdependent, which means they all rely on each other, and compromising any one of the three for a long period of time, hurts the other two. What Nikolai found is that successful people nurture all of these three factors on an ongoing basis.
When I think about this equation, my view is that the concept of achievement and growth are virtually inseparable. It may be possible to have achievement without growth in the short term, but I can't see how that would even look in the longer term. If your achievement is actually noteworthy, then what you'll find is that you will have to grow throughout that process.
Having said that, making growth a conscious priority will no doubt return superior dividends. If you focus on growth and development and the challenge of being able to achieve at your peak, this will enhance your achievements, allowing you to accomplish even more than you otherwise could.
And it becomes a virtuous circle. You seek to grow, and that opens up greater achievement of possibilities. As you pursue these possibilities, your achievements become even more spectacular.
That's definitely worth thinking about.
Nicolai has defined seven frenemies, which I think is a great term, of ambitious people; competitiveness, desire, perseverance, boldness, independence, convention, and flexibility.
Most ambitious people recognise these factors in themselves, at least to some degree. Many get to where they are because of these friends. But further down the track, the positive attributes can tend to dominate and become the enemy of your balance, and therefore, your return on ambition.
I want to talk about a few of the ones that I have commonly observed and have had to curb in myself over time to make sure that their positive impact didn't turn into a negative force.
Let's start with competitiveness
I've always been a competitive person. And this is fostered for most of us at a really young age when we engage in a team or individual sport.
There's a high level visibility into our academic application and achievements. And the rewards were given for winning are self reinforcing.
Now I'm all for this. I'm pragmatic enough to know that almost everything in life has a competitive undertone. So unless you learn to understand the role it plays in your life, it can be really tricky, as many of you have no doubt discovered already.
Although it might seem counterintuitive, life is ultimately about finding what makes you truly happy and fulfilled. But in my experience, very few people ever reach that state if they feel as though they're not achieving or receiving as much as the next person.
As Teddy Roosevelt said, "Comparison is the thief of joy".
But unfortunately comparison is almost impossible to avoid unless you're living in a cave. Only the strongest and most philosophically zen amongst us, learn to live without being influenced by comparison.
But that aside, competition is what brings out people's best. All you need to do is experience the difference in performance, in companies that effectively operate in a monopoly market, versus those that operate in a fiercely competitive landscape.
I've been able to experience both. I firmly believe that without some form of competition, complacency and mediocrity will dominate.
There's two types of competitiveness, which I learned the beauty of many years ago. There's the competitiveness that drives you internally, to be the best you can possibly be. And then there's the competitiveness that's measured against other people and against external outcomes.
Let's start with the latter. Career progression for ambitious people requires you to go up through the levels of an organisation via a series of promotions. For every role, you're clearly not the only person who desires that promotion. There are other people both inside and outside your company who aspire to it.
So you can't help but judge your achievement based on your success in being promoted ahead of your peers. This can bring out your competitiveness, but it's not always really healthy.
What is it about the competitiveness that drives you to be the best that you can possibly be?
I learned a lot about this from running marathons. I wasn't a great runner, but I was a tidy hacker, with a few 3 hour 15 minute marathon finishes. I used to train with a close group of people in the mountains and around the lakes of Canberra, Australia's capital.
We all had fiercely competitive spirits, but we were never really competing against each other. When you run a marathon, you're only competing against yourself. How much training can you do in the months leading up to the race, while staying healthy and not becoming injured? How much do you push yourself on those cold mornings, when you have to climb a quarter of a mile vertical to get to the top of a rise? On race day, how do respond mentally, when you still have five miles to run, and all you want to do is sit down in the gutter and cry?
This is where competitiveness shows through in the most positive way, and it's incredibly healthy in my view. It builds your confidence and self-esteem, it makes you better deep down, and it doesn't depend in any way on what the people around you are doing.
How about perseverance?
Being able to keep going without being discouraged is an incredibly valuable personal attribute to have. In terms of unrealized success, most people just don't persevere for long enough. They hit some obstacles, decide it's all too hard, and then they give up. This is one of the attributes that I found to be universal in successful people.
I simply don't know anyone who is successful in any area of their life, who hasn't demonstrated perseverance. Parenting children well requires perseverance. Staying fit and healthy requires perseverance. Staying mentally healthy and spiritually strong requires perseverance.
Perseverance is clearly your friend, but how does it become your enemy? Well the dark side of perseverance rears its ugly head when you don't know when to back off.
Sometimes perseverance can be so strong, that it can cause you to lose sight of the bigger picture. There are going to be times when just enough perseverance becomes too much.
How do you know when it's time to back off? This is a delicate balance between perseverance and perspective that we all need to be mindful of and regulate ourselves towards.
The last frenemy of ambition that I want to talk about is independence.
When we talk about ambition, what boss doesn't love someone who's a self-starter? Low maintenance and self-driven to achieve to the highest possible standards.
Now I'm one of them. I made life easy for my bosses because often the standard I set for my own performance exceeded their expectations, and I drove that standard through my teams.
It's incredibly positive to be a self-starter and to be self-driven and motivated. This independence brings massive benefits for you and your stakeholders. However the downside, is that a strong sense of independence, can also be quite isolating.
Once I'd learned to rely mostly on myself, I would tend to cut ties to the people in support systems around me, not consciously, but just subconsciously. Just gradually, it took hold of me.
Now it wasn't that I isolated myself, it was just that there were very few people I could see around me, that I thought were valuable, in assisting me. And look, I know that sounds arrogant, but I channelled my energies into being that support for my people, and I neglected to seek it myself.
With a little more maturity, I started to realize the benefit of maintaining the connections to others, that both supported me personally, and enabled me to optimise how my teams worked.
The bottom line on return on ambition, is it many highly ambitious and successful people in hindsight, believe that they've sacrificed way too much, in terms of their growth and wellbeing, in order to achieve their career ambition. We've got to make sure that we stay away from the dark side of our frenemies if we're not to fall into that trap ourselves.
The link between ambition and performance
While we often feel that being labelled as ambitious is a slight against our character, it's actually an essential ingredient of performance. If we think about my marathon running example, ambition is closely coupled to care factor.
What I found over the years is that people who lack ambition in a career sense don't ever reach their peak potential.
Why? Because that's not what they value, and there's nothing wrong at all with that, don't get me wrong.
However, if I have the choice between hiring someone who is clearly driven and ambitious and someone with similar qualifications who appears to lack the same drive, the ambitious person is getting hired every single time.
When I was a chief executive, if I didn't have an incredible drive for the company to improve and be better, no one else would act in the face of that.
There are many examples in my career where this became evident for me. Now at CS Energy, the productivity of the workers at some of our power stations was extremely low, and it wasn't necessarily the people's fault.
Over the years, the company had built up a raft of processes and procedures and a culture that didn't value productivity. So we did some benchmarking work through a highly respected consulting firm, Partners in Performance, and a big shout out to my close colleagues from PIP, Huggo and Csaba.
The insular nature of the company had enticed people to believe their own bullshit. The people actually believed that they were efficient and productive. Even when they saw the benchmarking results, they refuse to believe that there was a better way to do things. They were comfortable and they were happy with where they were, and for the most part, completely lacked the ambition required to improve.
There was clearly a problem with the culture. My ambition was always to make the company the best it could possibly be, and I expended huge amounts of energy and commitment to that end. But it was often like pulling teeth; extremely slow and painful, and the scarring took a long time to heal. But over time with the help of people on the ground, we lifted the performance of the teams and gave them the belief and evidence that there were better ways to do the job, without compromising either quality or safety. This resulted in large cost savings for both overtime and contractor spend and better performance outcomes for the plant.
The increase in performance was a direct result of the ambition that said "being fourth quartile in productivity performance, compared to our industry peers, is totally unacceptable. And I won't rest until we improve". And look, even though it may have been considered working below my level, I attended the weekly progress report meetings just to make sure everyone understood how important this initiative was for the company overall.
So while you're factoring in the return on ambition for you personally, don't forget that ambition is a key determinant of company and team performance. All of your people benefit when you can move them in that direction even if they don't particularly enjoy the challenging process that gets them there.
A REFLECTION OF my achievements, ambition, and sacrifice
I want to wrap up with some personal reflections. When I look back on my own return on ambition over my career in life, I'm pretty comfortable with how it's turned out so far.
That's not to say it's always been optimized, quite the opposite. There have been times where my growth, and more often my wellbeing, have been severely compromised by the pressures created by my ambition.
But even the periods where I was stretched in terms of my well-being, actually gave me an incredible return on ambition in the longer term.
I've told a story before on the podcast about the period where I had moved cities, taken on my first C-level role with a major listed company, I was studying my executive MBA in intensive mode, and going through a divorce. This was a time when I expected to be out of balance, and wouldn't necessarily think it provided a good return on ambition.
However, the accelerated learning at this time, super-charged my growth. Although my wellbeing was challenged in the short-term, the long-term confidence I got from handling all of this, was incredible.
I learnt that I could go through an unbelievable amount of stress without dropping the ball. But it took effort and attention to keep everything mildly running. I remember driving an hour and a half after work, several nights a week, to my ex-wife's place to see my daughters and read them a bedtime story, and then to drive home again. And that's an enduring memory for both them and for me, and that was worth the effort.
If you're concerned about the balance, it's worth going back to listen to Episode 104: Balancing the Load. This episode addresses how to cope with life and still optimise your career. But the bottom line, is that overall, I'm really happy with where I'm at.
Why? Well collectively, all of my ambition over many decades has funnelled itself into what I'm doing now. I'm completely comfortable in pursuing the most ambitious, possible purpose, to improve the quality of leaders globally.
I have enough scars and bruises that I feel confident to have a crack at anything, knowing that it won't be fatal.
Was my high level of ambition for myself and the people who work for me worth it? Absolutely. And that's why I'm here.
But here's the difference with where I am now.
The ambition that drove me for a long time, helped me to succeed and reach the external goals that I had for myself. If all of this ambition had landed me as an end game in a CEO role that paid a boatload of money, well, that would have been fine, but I would have also been challenged to think differently about some of the sacrifices I had to make along the way.
I may have assessed my return on ambition quite differently. The combination of achievement, growth, and wellbeing, may have looked a little more skewed. Instead, I was able to channel my ambition and growth into discovering and pursuing my true nature and purpose. Now, in this context, my return on ambition has been nothing short of spectacular.
If I were to give you a recipe for the key ingredients to this, I would sum it up in the following four points, recognising of course, that everyone's path is absolutely unique
#1 Have ambition to grow, for the good of those around you and the companies you work for. And don't shirk any opportunities to do this. It'll make the journey valuable in and of itself. And you're likely to avoid any feeling of being let down, on the off chance that you don't reach your ultimate objective.
#2 Only compete with yourself and not with those around you. You know nothing of their circumstances and lives, so be satisfied to know that you're making the most of what you've got, on any given day. If you're oriented towards growth and development, it'll support the other two ingredients of your return on ambition pretty well.
#3 Although there's nothing wrong with pursuing external and material goals, your ambition has to go beyond this if you want it to result in deep long-term satisfaction. I'm sure that many of Nicolai's interview subjects in the book, found that achievement of externally focused or material goals doesn't ultimately bring satisfaction. And the other elements of growth and wellbeing have to be there to support the achievements.
#4 Work to discover your true nature and purpose as early as you can. I worked out what my true nature and purpose was in 2007, but I had to spend the next 10 years trying to work out how that would manifest itself. But what I do know is that everything I did somehow took me closer to that. And if your ambition is aligned to this, you can't go wrong.
RESOURCES AND RELATED TOPICS:
Episode 138: It’s Not Who you Know, It’s What You Know - Listen Here
Episode #104: Balancing the Load - Listen Here
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