Every leader needs drive to succeed - but we’re getting it wrong.

Do you remember being asked this question? My daughter is now 15, heading to her first round of mock GCSEs before the real thing next year. It’s a question she’s being asked frequently by family and our friends, and one I’m encouraging her to resist.

Whilst there’s no malintent behind the question, our apparent need to categorise someone by the specific job that they do seems to be quite entrenched. Plus, it risks limiting her imagination to jobs and roles we can think of. After all, with perhaps a tiny number of exceptions, which of us could have forecast the jobs that we now have? ‘I can’t wait to be the MLRO for a financial services firm,’ is an unlikely response from a teenager!

The better question is this: ‘What do you find interesting now and what do you think could be really exciting in your future?’ If you asked my daughter, you’d hear something about travel, Orca, oceans, theatre/experiences, close friends and earning decent money. 

Here’s where I’m starting to think that we might be getting it wrong when it comes to ambition and drive in our workplaces. 

Have we become so focused on a specific role or a particular business need that we’ve blocked out most of what makes life and work interesting, exciting and life-giving?

Either for ourselves or for the people we’re leading, promoting and recruiting? If our minds and conversations are dominated by hitting a deadline, getting through a long list of tasks and surviving a bunch of meetings rather than on the bigger picture reasons that we’re doing all this, then we might be in trouble.

Given that ‘drive’ is one of the four critical factors that make for excellent leadership*, fostering healthy drive and ambition that is motivating and sustaining is essential. If the leaders are not ambitious, then no one else will be either. If they’re excessively ambitious, they’ll burn others, and eventually themselves, out.

Drawing on some recent experiences with leaders and teams, here are three scenarios where leaders are getting it wrong and what they could do about them.  

1. The leader who’s lost their mojo. Once highly driven, putting in a huge amount of effort, energy and positivity, they are now far less interested, content to collect the salary and prefer to play it safe. They love to build new things but once achieved, they become just a little bored and sometimes jaded, especially as achieving success has delivered financial rewards along the way.  

There are three actions that they can choose to take:  

• With some urgency, they can remind themselves of why they do what they do. What’s the positive difference that they want to make to other people’s lives? How does their business contribute something good to the world, even if only in a small way? In other words, what’s the point and purpose of it all? If the honest answers are all ‘none’, they might need to shift to the third action below.  

• Reshape their role to something that’s much more exciting. They may have fallen into the trap of going through the motions, doing the ‘same old' without reimagining what could now be possible and exciting. It’s far easier to project past experiences into the future than to imagine possibilities that have not yet been experienced. A crucial question for this leader is this: ‘Now that we’ve built the business, how can this workplace provide a platform for doing the things that I truly find interesting?’ 

• Leave. Pass the leadership baton to someone else who is motivated to push the business forward and release themselves to take on a new situation that would be more stimulating. That might sound dramatic and uncertain, but life is too short to plod on miserably. On top of that, blocking the pathway for new and energetic leaders is not the hallmark of an excellent leader. 

2) The leader who’s become obsessed with checklists. Workplace conversations, 1-2-1s and team meetings have become sterile, focused solely on project plans, dashboards, and task lists. The things that truly motivate (most) people - life experiences, quality family life, making a difference to others - have been removed. It’s no surprise that ambition and initiative across the whole organisation are beginning to wane.  

What will this leader try? They’re beginning to initiate real-life conversations with their people. Despite some resistance from HR, they are resetting the tone of their ‘performance’ conversations from ratings-oriented to life-interest. This includes finding out what some of their people love to try outside of work and encouraging and enabling them to do so. Write a book? - Great. Run a marathon? - Fantastic. Visit family overseas more often - Wonderful! As well as verbal encouragement, this support can include practical resources, such as time, connections and money (e.g. funding a course).  

Why does this matter? Drive is a whole-of-life habit. It’s incredibly difficult to be driven in one area of life (like work) and completely apathetic in another (home). The energy, thinking and actions that go together with drive transcend the work-life boundaries that unwittingly apply. In other words, if someone gets the bit between the teeth in the pursuit of a ‘bucket list’ goal, they will become more driven at work. If you don’t believe me, please test the idea with some of your people and let me know how they get on!  

3) The hyper-driven leader who’s burning their people out. It’s understandable. The fact that they are in a leading role is due, in no small part, to their drive and ambition. But the presumption that others are similarly disposed is causing them to push their expectations, intentions and assumptions too aggressively over everyone else. A handful of their team are running with the energy reasonably well. Regrettably, most find it overwhelming or even offensive. There’s a real risk that, by pushing too hard, the leader will cause a couple of their people to fold.

What’s needed is a slightly more measured approach to achieving great things. It’s a combination of stress plus rest that leads to growth.

The very best leaders know precisely when to press forward and when to ease back just a little, creating the breathing spaces that are essential for any person and any organisation to thrive. 

 What will this leader try? They are literally slowing their pace - walking normally (not at Olympic speed), speaking calmly, inviting questions and pausing to hear them. It took no time at all for people to notice this change. Their next move will be to spend just a little more time with those people at the front line to understand their realities; there’s nothing like a dose of empathy for fostering a high-performing environment.

Without drive, we atrophy and no one wants that. But it’s the whole person that matters, not just the ‘work’ person. Whether ourselves or our people, encouraging ambition throughout life is what will separate the most excellent leaders from the ‘meh’.

What helps you create a healthy drive in your organisation? We’d love to hear and help you achieve your aims! 

* the others are care, awareness and resolution. We measure these plus 29 other traits when working with leaders and teams using a sophisticated psychometric tool. It’s a great way to identify where our clients need to focus their attention.