Have you heard of Rajat Gupta?

Gupta was raised in Kolkata, Indiana, and was orphaned in his early teens. But he excelled in his studies and later completed his MBA at Harvard Business School. Gupta became the CEO of McKinney and grew his personal net worth to around 100 million dollars. He also served with the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and partnered with well-known philanthropists like Bill Gates. Quite a success story, right?

In 2008, however, Gupta was arrested for insider trading. Despite his achievements in career, education, and recognition, he risked it all. Gupta’s misguided ambition led him to lose everything. ¹

Now, there are many factors at play here, but personal ambition has the power to compromise ethics and humility, leaving behind broken promises, damaged relationships, and burned bridges, all for the sake of personal gain or progress.

But is ambition always a bad thing? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course). The answer is no! However, unrefined and misguided ambition can be unhealthy and even dangerous. Just think of the Greek myth of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, or the cautionary tale of Rajat Gupta we just read about.

In a helpful article by the Harvard Business Review, three types of ambition are defined:

1. Performance ambition: focusing on achieving results for oneself or the organization.
2. Growth ambition: focusing on personal development and growth.
3. Achievement ambition: focusing on external rewards for oneself or others.

Each of these forms of ambition carries its own benefits and risks. But there’s a fourth type of ambition we haven’t discussed yet: redeemed ambition.

Defining Redeemed Ambition

Redeemed ambition can be defined as utilizing one’s drive to bring prosperity to an organization, its employees, and ultimately, society. On the surface, this may seem similar to the previous three forms of ambition, and indeed, there are many parallels. However, for a leader driven by redeemed ambition, humility, confidence, and self-sacrifice are the underlying motivators.

A leader with redeemed ambition empowers and brings out the best in others. They know how to challenge and motivate their team to perform just above their capacity, pushing them to grow without causing harm. This is the difference between inspiring and bullying. Leadership can either be driven by force and misguided ambition or by partnership and encouragement, which is redeemed ambition.

On the other hand, bad or immature ambition seeks personal glory and gratification, while redeemed ambition uses humility, influence, and stature to serve a greater vision and others.

Ultimately, ambition itself is not intrinsically evil or wrong. In fact, a lack of ambition can be an issue. However, when ambition is misplaced or misguided, it hinders growth and well-being in individuals, teams, and organizations. Redeemed ambition, however, has the potential to develop the leaders and teams that the world truly needs.

^{1 I originally read this story in the book The Psychology of Money. Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness, (London, UK: Harriman House 2020), 35 – 39. See also: D. McDonald, “Rajta Gupta: Touched by scandal,” Fortune (October 1, 2020).} 

Leadership guru Peter Drucker once said, “Only three things come naturally to all organisations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.” 

In this blog post, we will delve into Drucker’s insight and explore the natural but unhealthy defaults that organisations tend to fall into when we don’t think intentionally about how we lead. By understanding these defaults, proactive leaders can provide clarity and synergy to their teams.

Drucker’s insight resonates with the old adage: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Leaders play a crucial role in guiding and directing their teams, ensuring a clear path towards achieving goals. By actively planning and strategising, leaders can prevent the defaults that hinder organisational success and instead set people up for success.

Let’s explore the three natural but unhealthy defaults Drucker identifies:

1 Friction

Have you ever experienced the looming feeling of coming to work in an environment rife with gossip, selfish agendas, and sloppy habits? Yeah, those are each forms of friction.

Friction is often present in organisations because we don’t have a leader who can help us hold courageous conversations which help to nip deteriorating talk in the bud. Sadly, friction is inevitable without healthy leadership.

2 Confusion

Confusion is present when you hear people saying they don’t know what is going on, and if they do, they don’t know why it is going on.

Decisions seem a mystery, and people are not sure just what direction they should go in. There is no clear wider vision and people don’t know where to direct their extra energy, or what would be helpful.

Confusion can stem from many things: lack of communication, lack of vision, unclear goals or KPIs, or perhaps some decisions have been made that the leader forgot to convey.

3 Underperformance

You know when people say “bring your whole self to work?” Well the reality is that we are all potentially many different selves. There is our bored, disengaged self, preoccupied self, or our anxious even our fearful self. None of them sees us produce our best.

Yet, from creative agencies to Fortune 500 companies, organisations must perform. People desire to be a part of a place that is going somewhere and bring their best self to it. 

What do Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have in common? Well outside of major feats in each of their respective careers and fields – they each were notorious for driving teammates and collaborators to their threshold. Jobs, Jordan, and Kobe believed in challenging others to a higher standard for the sake of great performance. 

“As a leader of a team it’s your responsibility to elevate the rest of the team….you have to get people to a space where they wake up every morning driven to be the best version of themselves,”

Kobe Bryant 

While we don’t advocate for the means or character each of these individuals used – there is some method to their madness. Many of their teammates and coworkers have stated that they would not trade working with these individuals for the world because they made them, both as individuals and as a collective, better. 

Great leaders enable others to step up, and do the best we can. 

If the leader or leaders you work with tick all these boxes, you can indeed be grateful – and do tell them that you appreciate what they do (for there are many times when leadership is a lonely and difficult road, and leaders also need encouragement). 

But if not, ask yourself what you can do today to be part of the solution rather than simply add to the friction, confusion and underperformance.

The role of the company within the Australian economic landscape is well established, but as we find ourselves surrounded by what some interpret as ominously apocalyptic operating environments – floods, fires and plagues – the role of organisational responsibility is taking centre stage. But the question being asked is now broader than simply: what do we need to do to meet our social requirements? We are now beginning to ask: what should we do, given the power and influence that we have?

The real question: How might we become organisations of positive social change?

Companies are seen to hold more than a duty to simply comply with the law, and face increasing public pressure to uphold virtues in keeping with an expanding social morality. The merits of this can be debated relentlessly, but as this debate ensues it’s important for directors and executives to give serious attention to the ways in which they can steer their organisations beyond cultures of legal compliance toward cultures of responsibility and care. 

At AVENIR we believe in fostering leadership that keeps a keen eye on the future, and is capable of imagining and cultivating a world of flourishing for all. And so when it comes to directors, our goal is to open conversations about the future that focus on how organisation can contribute to meaningful change in the world. 

When it comes to issues like climate change, the automation of the workforce, rising dependence on AI, and epidemics of anxiety and depression, it is corporations – the backbone of Australian working life – who have the capacity to create environments that support health, wellbeing, and stability. 

But why should we – we’re here to make money, that’s our contribution?

It’s a valid question. In Australia the role of shareholder primacy has a long history, but failing to observe the shifting tides of cultural thought has often proven financially detrimental. If you turn on your newsfeed you will find plenty of examples of corporations being dragged through the coals for actions that are deemed to fall short of our collective social responsibility. These may not be failures of legal compliance, but there are understood to be failures of social and moral responsibility. 

When your operations begin to impact lives, families, and cultures (and most companies have at least a minor impact on one or more of these spheres) then there is a level of assumed responsibility that extends beyond merely doing the bare minimum. 

Organisations, by virtue of their existence, are part of an economic ecosystem that impacts so much of our shared national life. This simple fact alone is an argument in favour of directors – the mind of the company – beginning to explore how they can increasingly consider a broad range of stakeholders in their deliberations, without compromising long-term shareholder value. 

Stakeholders such as the environment, the direct and indirect community surrounding the company, the culture within which the organisation exists, and even the future generations that the company’s operations might impact, are all increasingly important considerations.

In 2016, Noel Huntley delivered the now oft-quoted opinion piece where he claimed that it would only be a matter of time before a director was sued for a failure to perceive climate-related risk. With subsequent judicial decisions indicating that a broadening duty of care is owed by both organisations and governments to stakeholders such as the environment, and even children, it seems likely stewardship of the future should now become a regular feature of governance deliberation. 

Jon Bergmann

It was one of those “snap” experiences.  I was the second speaker at a conference.  Unbeknown to me, the first speaker had framed his presentation on the exact same topic that I had prepared for. It was one of those situations where I saw failure on the horizon as I frantically wondered how much I was going to have to delete from my notes.  As it turned out, it was fantastic to hear Dr Matt Kutz speak with clarity and energy on the subject of contextual intelligence.  Encountering his work was like finding a missing puzzle piece that I’d been looking for.  His book, “Contextual Intelligence” is absolutely worth reading.

I want to consider one of Matt’s assertions that, in order to respond well as leaders in constantly changing environments, we need to be thinking in terms of contribution rather than experience.

Most leaders work their way into leadership roles over time on the basis of study and experience.  We “prove our worth” through demonstrated capacity.  So, when challenges come, it is assumed that we have a bank of proven experience to draw from.  This is great when challenges are predictable but we’re no longer living in times of predictability.  So, the question must be asked: “Does experienced based leadership practice have any currency in an unpredictable world?” 

The answer, according to Dr Kutz is “yes” but “not for the reason you think.”  Effective leadership practice needs to pivot towards developing the skill to ask better questions and involve others in the process of navigating complexity.  Effective leaders bring their best contribution through naming the challenge and welcoming the capacities and experiences of the team.  Contemporary effective leadership understands that as change appears on the horizon, it’s possible that the novice may be more likely to have a solution for an emerging problem than the experienced leader.

Tania Watson

When we get busy, we instinctively just do more.

The logic is there is more to do and that means we need to do more.

We probably reason it won’t always be this way, so we exert extra effort in the hope our situation will soon improve and things can get back to normal. Whatever normal is.

The ‘work harder when we get busier’ mantra may work every now and then when there are genuine peaks of busyness in our lives. But constant busyness is a trap. It’s not healthy and if we are honest, it probably doesn’t produce our best work.

And, as I’ve found through bitter experience, it’s not a trap you can crawl out of the same way you get in.

Sometimes the best solutions are the complete opposite of what we may first think.

The moment I begin to feel over-committed, I set aside at least 30 minutes, and even up to an hour, and take my notebook and pen (not usually my phone) and sit in a quiet place, usually a cafe.

I don’t feel bad about doing this.

I know more will be achieved in the next 30 minutes than would ever be done by tackling the next task on my to do list while I am in an overloaded state of mind.

With coffee in hand, I begin to write down all of the things that have logged-jammed in my mind and cause me to feel too busy. All of them — work stuff, family, personal — I don’t leave anything out. As I’ve written previously, I also write out the why of every action.

I don’t mind how many times I’ve written the same to-do list, I write it out again. Owning my current state of busyness is vitally important to actually doing something about it.

I don’t rush the process. In fact — again borrowing from the counter-intuitive — I deliberately slow everything down. I write my list slowly. I drink my coffee slowly. I slow down my breathing.

It might take 20 minutes or more, but once I’ve dumped everything into my lists, I’m ready then to do two very simple things.

First, I am ready to assess the overall magnitude of my situation. Is it actually real? Sometimes I’ve found that it is only one, or maybe two tasks that have caused the feeling of overwhelm.

When that is the case, I break those bigger tasks down into smaller ones. A big task that’s been on my mind might actually require four or five steps to complete. So, I write each of those steps down. I make sure I am clear on why each step is important.

Second, if my situation is still genuinely log-jammed, I look for ways to relieve pressure. I relax self-imposed deadlines first. Just cutting myself some slack, usually relieves more than half my pressure. It does not involve having to negotiate with others, nor do I feel like I’m letting anyone down.

If I’m still feeling uncomfortable about what’s in front of me — and occasionally I do — it gives me a very clear road-map for who I need to speak to, and about what. If I need a deadline extended, I can be much clearer about my need for more time, because I have taken the time to clearly weigh up all of my circumstances and other commitments.

If I was to have a conversation about extending a deadline before taking the time to consider my situation, I’m likely to risk either over or under-reacting and can make matters worse.

After this process, I always feel better. I feel like I’m back in control even though in that half hour or so, I haven’t actually done a single thing on my list.

Stopping like this also has a longer term benefit. It has made me much better at not perpetually over-committing. Unless we learn to better schedule ourselves, and know our limits, we will constantly find ourselves feeling overloaded and in the futile loop of fighting busyness with more busyness.

Recently, someone saw me at a cafe when I was re-prioritising my schedule and said something like “It’s easy for some. I’d love your job.” I smiled as they hurried away, and took their observation as the ultimate compliment.

Just half an hour earlier I had felt too busy to think.

Jeff Miller