Collective Ambition

Do you work with people who seem to be waiting for their time at the workplace to come to an end, either daily or longer term? Some seem to have a lot of experience, yet they aren’t quite representing your organization’s evolving values and leadership style . You’ll recognize them if they seem to be putting in the hours but lack an obvious key ingredient: ambition.

Other team members may notice and ask themselves why these individuals just keep coming back to work even though their motivation tanked long ago. The sad truth is that the folks I’m talking about have worked hard their whole careers and blazed trails back in the day when they were driven and ambitious. When and why does this change for some individuals, and not for others? A colleague told me this week that she thought it was because folks fitting this profile have stopped leading change. If this true, this is a serious problem – unless ambition can be nurtured or rekindled, what options do you have to deal with these circumstances? A bigger challenge is to consider how to prevent a new regime of employees from running out of ambition - ever.

Let’s pause here for a moment to distinguish between ambition at an individual level and “collective ambition" as described by Ready and Trulove (2011) in their article The Power of Collective Ambition .

What I learned most from the Ready and Truelove article is that one important aspect of “collective ambition” is a clearly defined definition of leadership behavior. Within a frame work of "collective ambition", leadership behavior is defined as how leaders act daily as they implement the organization’s vision and strategies, striving to fulfill the brand promise, and living up to the organization’s values. There’s a problem when some leaders’ ambitions fizzle, or if they are anchored in a past vision and an old set of values.

I suppose the lesson here for all of us is, that individual motivation and ambition is fundamental to creating a "collectively ambitious" work environment. Take the survey in the Ready and Truelove article to see where your organization scores, and then ask others you work with to do so too just out of curiosity to find out if your perspective is more or less optimistic than the collective group.

The article stipulates that an organization’s purpose is the most important of the seven elements of collective ambition, however, we have to remind ourselves that any one of the seven elements on their own, or even in combination with two or three elements won’t yield the same benefit as an integrated approach. In summary and in closing, here are the seven elements necessary to foster "collective ambition":

Purpose: your company’s reason for being; the core mission of the enterprise.

Vision: the position or status your company aspires to achieve within a reasonable time frame.

Targets and milestones: the metrics you use to assess progress toward your vision.

Strategic and operational priorities: the actions you do or do not take in pursuit of your vision.

Brand promise: the commitments you make to stakeholders (customers, communities, investors, employees, regulators, and partners) concerning the experience the company will provide.

Core values: the guiding principles that dictate what you stand for as an organization, in good times and bad.

Leader behaviors: how leaders act on a daily basis as they seek to implement the company’s vision and strategic priorities, strive to fulfill the brand promise, and live up to the values.

I love sports analogies, especially because I love certain sports. I suppose this attraction is due to the entertainment value sports provide, but I also imagine that in some instances, art imitates life and sports stories tell us more about parallel journeys we have in other parts, even in the workplace. Check out this two minute video to see what individual ambition looks like (it gets better after 1:30 minutes). Then imagine if you had a whole team of players with the same attitude, heart, and ambition as individuals, and collectively.

I will leave you with your imagination on that last point. I'll be back next weekend.