For instance, are you always providing answers rather than inviting others’ input? Do others see you as arrogant and impatient? If so, channel your achievement drive into altruistic achievement: replace coercion with collaboration, balance direction with influence, and focus less on results and more on people. Discern whether your achievement drive is undermining your leadership style.
How to guard against achievement overdrive? As Spreier, Fontaine, and Malloy suggest, recognize that the best leaders strive to help others succeed. Result? Overachievers stifle others’ drive and development-ultimately eroding organizational performance, demolishing trust, and undermining morale. Many also cut corners, neglect to communicate crucial information, and ignore others’ concerns. To meet ambitious goals-a revenue aim, a sales target-overachievers command and coerce employees rather than coach and collaborate with them. It fuels innovation, productivity, and growth: companies would be lost without it.īut taken to an extreme, the drive to achieve can damage an enterprise. The company as a whole can play a part, too: Organizations must learn when to draw on the achievement drive and when to rein it in.Ī leader’s hunger to achieve-to continually be the best-is a major source of strength for any organization. You can adopt specific new behaviors, such as engaging your team in a discussion of how to achieve goals, rather than issuing a set of directives. If you’re an overachiever seeking to broaden your range, you can study your actions and ask your team, peers, and manager to give you honest feedback. Rather than order people around, they provided vision, sought buy-in and commitment, and coached. The leaders who created high-performing and energizing climates got more lasting results by using a broad range of styles, choosing different ones for different circumstances. To look at how motives and leadership style affect a group’s work climate and performance, the authors studied 21 senior managers at IBM. Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power.
He said the power motive comes in two forms: personalized, in which the leader draws strength from controlling people, and socialized, where the leader derives strength from empowering people.
Psychologist David McClelland identified three drivers of behavior: achievement, meeting a standard of excellence affiliation, maintaining close relationships and power, having an impact on others. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, stifling subordinates. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals, an executive or company can damage performance. There’s a dark side to the trend, however. The authors’ consulting firm has seen a steady increase in the extent to which achievement motivates managers. The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, and it is on the rise.