I was talking to someone recently about performance reviews when they made a comment that sounded perfectly reasonable at first.
“They’re brilliant,” they said. “They just don’t seem particularly ambitious.”
It wasn’t meant as a criticism. If anything, there was a hint of frustration, as though someone with that much ability ought to be reaching for more.
The remark prickled something inside me, mainly because of the assumption beneath it.
What if they were ambitious, just not in the way we had chosen to recognise?
The more I thought about it, the more I realised how often as a society and as leaders we confuse ambition with progression. When someone pushes for promotion, volunteers for bigger projects or talks openly about the next step in their career, we instinctively call them ambitious. Yet someone else can be every bit as capable and committed, entirely fulfilled in the role they already have, and still be seen differently.
They are viewed differently, and potentially not as positively, not because they are underperforming or lack commitment, but because they are not trying to ‘climb’.
Somewhere along the way, many organisations seem to have created an ambition hierarchy. We don’t tend to name it, but it definitely shapes how we see our people. Those that are seen to be moving upwards are treated as having the greatest potential while those who stay where they are can too easily be assumed to have reached theirs.
I’m of the belief that this categorically is not true and that we need to squash this as a perspective, firstly within leadership but actually more broadly.
Over the years, I’ve worked with people who wanted nothing more than to lead, whether that’s a team, a department or a whole organisation. That responsibility energised them and they enjoyed making decisions and actively sought opportunities to stretch themselves in that way. It is absolutely the case that good organisations need people like that.
I’ve also worked with people who had no interest in becoming managers or leaders at all. They weren’t avoiding responsibility at all, they just found fulfilment elsewhere in their work. They wanted to become exceptional at their craft, took enormous pride in consistently excellent work and became the person everyone called when things grew complicated. They were the consistent presence a team needed during change.
If we measured by commitment, professionalism or impact, it would be very hard to claim that one was more ambitious than the other.
It’s just that their ambitions were pointing in different directions.
I do sometimes wonder whether we have become so preoccupied with where people are heading that we forget to ask what actually drives them. It’s something we’ve been conditioned to become accustomed to from a very young age; “what do you want to be when you grow up?” is the typical question, every child hears.
It’s the same when you think about the questions that are often traditionally asked in development conversations. Where do you see yourself in five years? What role, challenge or promotion comes next? These can be useful questions, but they carry an assumption that everyone measures success in broadly the same way, but many people don’t.
We need to be more explicit in our advocacy for what success means, because for some, success means influence, and for others, it means expertise. For someone else, it may be the freedom to leave work on time most evenings because coaching their daughter’s football team matters just as much as the job they do between nine and five.
Having different motivations doesn’t make them any less committed to their work - it actually makes them human.
Organisations talk about diversity, and rightly so. We value different experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking because teams make better decisions when people do not approach every problem in exactly the same way.
Yet when it comes to ambition, we often expect remarkable uniformity, and the trouble is this creates a lack of parity of esteem for those colleagues that aren’t chasing the next rung on the ladder.
We celebrate the person who wants to become Head of Department but we do not always celebrate the person determined to become the best engineer, adviser, administrator or project manager they can be. Promotions usually receive loud congratulations, public announcements and universal praise, whilst expertise often gets a quieter nod.
It is subtle, but over time it can send a clear message about what success is supposed to look like particularly when leaders appear to reinforce the assumption through their behaviours.
I don’t believe that is intentional but it can create deeper organisational problems with people who do not really want to move into management or leadership feeling force to put themselves forward in order to be recognised. The impact of that is a whole other blog post!
I firmly feel that most leaders genuinely want the best for their people. They invest time in development because they care. The difficulty is that we sometimes define development too narrowly because we assume it must always point upwards.
In reality, some of the most meaningful growth I’ve seen has happened without anyone changing their job title.
I’ve watched people become outstanding mentors to those starting their careers, despite having no interest in management. I’ve seen colleagues develop remarkable judgement, earn deep trust and quietly become the person who holds a team together when things are difficult. They did not see any of it as preparation for leading a department. My point is that none of that appears on an organisation chart, but all of it makes the organisation stronger.
Those contributions deserve every bit as much recognition as a promotion, and this is where leadership becomes more nuanced than we sometimes admit.
It is easy to motivate someone whose aspirations resemble our own. If they want the next role, we can help them prepare for it. We understand that path because we have walked it ourselves.
It is harder when someone’s motivation does not fit the traditional career path.
That asks more of us as leaders, and it requires genuine curiosity from us.
Not just about the job they might want next, but about what gives them real satisfaction. What makes them leave work feeling they have had a worthwhile day? Which parts of their role would they gladly spend more time doing? Which achievements matter to them, even when those achievements attract little attention?
The answers that we receive will rarely be the same, and they absolutely should not be.
None of this means lowering expectations or reshaping every role around individual preferences, because leadership should never be about ‘pandering’. Every team still needs shared standards, clear accountability and a common purpose.
However, at the same time it is important to recognise that understanding motivation is something else entirely.
It means recognising that people can reach the same shared purpose by taking different roads.
The strongest teams I’ve known have never been made up entirely of people chasing promotion, and that’s a relief because frankly, that would be pretty exhausting. The best brought together ambitions that complemented one another and inevitable led to more diverse perspectives. Some people looked ahead and drove change while others provided expertise, continuity and stability to make things happen. Some loved leading from the front and others found the biggest fulfilment in becoming exceptionally good at what they did.
Together, they achieved far more than a group driven by one narrow idea of ambition ever could.
This is absolutely why I’ve become less interested in asking whether someone is ambitious enough and far more interested in understanding what they are ambitious for.
Once you know that, your work with them becomes less about reshaping someone’s motivation and more about giving them the chance to do their best work and bring their whole self to it, which, for me, is a far better use of a leader’s time.
If we are serious about valuing difference, we should recognise that diversity of ambition matters just as much as diversity of thought. This is why the question we should be asking isn’t whether someone wants to climb the ladder, but whether we’ve taken the time to understand what matters to them, and made room for it in the team.
