Leading an Ambitious Employee? Do These Things

Leading an ambitious employee can be a challenge.

On the one hand, an ambitious employee is often motivated to do more, and achieve more.

But the difficulty often arises when we need to provide opportunities to keep them interested. If we can’t, they become a flight risk when they start to consider heading for the exit.

In this post, I’ll take a look at some ideas for how you might lead your ambitious employee, so you can get the best out of them without destroying their motivation.

The Challenges of Leading an Ambitious Employee

First, let’s start with some of the challenges you might face when leading an ambitious employee.

Here are a few that I’ve come across in my career and from coaching leaders in this situation:

Limited opportunities. Ambitious employees thrive on opportunity. They need new challenges to feel motivated and to stretch themselves. Some organisations have limited potential to offer career development.
Lack of patience. Ambitious people want to make progress – fast! They don’t want to wait for years to hone their skills. And they don’t want to hear you say they should be patient, either.
Mismatched talent and aspirations. Sometimes ambitious team members aren’t really experienced or skilled enough (yet) to do what they want to do. They also don’t want to hear that they aren’t ready, which can lead to frustration for you and them!
Competitiveness. Sometimes ambitious team members may become competitive with others in the team. While this can have its benefits, it can become dysfunctional if it damages relationships.

So with all these challenges, how should we best deal with our ambitious employees?

Let’s look into that now.

Learn More: Thoughtful Leader Podcat #71: A Simple Model for Team Motivation.

3 Principles to Lead the Ambitious Employee

When dealing with these sorts of challenges, I find it helpful to think in terms of principles. You can use these principles to help you make decisions about how to deal with your ambitious people.

This is sometimes better than suggesting specific actions you should take, because your situation is unique and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Principle 1: Honesty

Honesty is important in leadership.

In fact, it’s the #1 leadership quality that people are looking for, according to the popular book “The Leadership Challenge“. In this book, the authors surveyed thousands of employees over 35 years and have revised their research over seven editions.

And in every edition of the book, honesty came out on top as the number one leadership quality.

So when it comes to ambitious employees, we need to be honest with them. This means being honest about:

Your view of the time it might take for them to progress their career
Any limitations on the opportunities the workplace can provide (promotions, money, other benefits)
The skills, behaviours, attitude and experience that are needed to progress to where they want to go.

What we don’t want is to lead the team member on, making them think it will be easier to progress when it isn’t. Or where there are opportunities to grow when they actually may be very limited.

They need your honest assessment of what it might take for them to get to where they want to go.

Learn More: Honest Leadership: How to Bring It More Often (and Why It Matters).

Principle 2: Accountability

We also need to hold our ambitious team member accountable.

This means that if we provide opportunities and support them to get to where they want to go, they need to fulfil their part of the bargain.

They need to be open to feedback, improvement and listening to your point of view. They need to take ownership of the quality of their work and how they behave in the team environment.

Without this principle, the relationship can become one-sided as you bend over backwards to try to satisfy your ambitious employee.

Learn More: Can’t Hold People Accountable? Here’s Why.

Principle 3: Follow-through

The third principle is simple. It’s about being good to your word.

That is, if you say you’ll provide opportunities or advancement for your ambitious employee, you need to follow through and deliver.

If you tell your ambitious team member that if they “do X” they’ll be able to achieve “Y”, then you’d better make sure you provide “Y” when they meet the objective.

Otherwise, trust will be broken, and they’ll know that even if they work hard and achieve great results, they aren’t likely to be able to progress.

Then it’s only a matter of time before they leave.

Tips For Handling Your Ambitious Employee

The principles can be handy to keep in mind when you’re deciding how to handle your employee.

However, here are some additional ideas that may be helpful too.

1. Clarify the Gap Between the Present and Future

Many ambitious employees are so keen to make progress that they believe they can get there quickly.

One way to limit this problem is to help to raise their awareness of the things it will take to get to where they need to go.

This includes aspects such as skills, qualifications, experience and behaviours.

Ideally, you can work with your ambitious team member to do a gap analysis. This means comparing where they are now, to where they want to be.

You can do this by:

Looking at your own career journey, and what you needed to do to get to where you are now
Connecting your team member with senior leaders who are where they want to be, so they can learn about their journey
Developing a plan of potential role progressions that could lead to their aspirational role
Researching industry trends (including job opportunities) to identify the key qualifications or skills that are sought after in the desired position.

Once you have these sources of information, you can help your team member work backwards.

What are they missing now that would hold them back?

How could they get it?

How long would that take?

All this can hopefully provide a reality-based view that can help set expectations of how long the journey might take.

Learn More: Thoughtful Leader Podcast #254: Let’s prioritise that career conversation.

2. Help Your Ambitious Team Member Find a Mentor

Mentors can be a valuable source of advice and support for an up and coming go-getter.

You might consider using your own networks to help your team member find a suitable person who could mentor them.

This helps to provide multiple perspectives for the ambitious team member, rather than just your own.

It may also give your team member a more realistic view of their prospects than if you were the only one in the conversation.

This can be very useful, especially if your team member is hyper-ambitious and needs somebody to help bring them down to earth!

If it’s just your opinion, they may think you’re trying to hold them back.

3. Don’t Tell Them to Be Patient

Try not to tell your ambitious employee to be patient.

They most likely don’t want to hear it, and they may believe you’re simply stopping their progress.

Instead, help them see what it will take to get where they want to go.

Then they can decide whether they are being realistic, or not.

4. Provide Regular, Effective Feedback

You need to raise awareness of any areas where you feel your ambitious team member might be lacking, as well as where they are on the right track.

One way to do this is through effective, regular feedback.

You can use the simple AID model to do this:

Action: State what you’ve observed (not hearsay that you’ve heard from someone else)
Impact: Let them know the impact of that action or situation
Desired outcome: Work with them to develop a more desirable outcome, that would have a more positive impact.

Here’s a simple example:

The other day, I noticed you spoke over Bob in the meeting (Action)
Bob was really upset about this, and was quiet for the rest of the meeting (Impact)
How could you help Bob engage and open up in these meetings going forward? (Desired outcome).

The feedback should include aspects of performance and behaviour, not just performance. You don’t want a high-achiever destroying team cohesion with bad behaviour because they are only focused on results.

Another similar but useful structure is through the SBI-BI model, shown below.

Without regular feedback, your ambitious team member may think they’re going well, when maybe they aren’t.

You want to be able to help them see their progress and be able to course-correct where necessary.

Otherwise, they might be in for a big surprise when they think they’ve done all they needed to progress, only to find out that they haven’t.

Learn More: 10 Simple & Effective Tips For Giving Feedback.

5. Build Relationships With Key Stakeholders

If you’re going to help your ambitious employee achieve their lofty goals, you’ll need support.

You’ll need support to help organise development opportunities, investigate potential promotion or pay increases or other benefits that might be rewarding for the team member.

It might take some time and strategic thinking to navigate a path for your ambitious employee to reach their goals.

This might mean setting expectations with senior leaders, and understanding what potential there may be for career enhancement, including opportunities that could be created if the team member hits their targets.

If your team member is doing all the right things, why would you want to stand in their way?

Learn More: Stakeholder Management Tips For the Everyday Leader.

Ambitious Employees Aren’t Easy to Lead

It’s always challenging when a team member wants to progress, fast.

You’ll need to invest time in setting expectations, helping them develop a plan and identifying the steps that need to be taken for them to achieve their goals.

That’s not to say we need to bend over backwards for them. They need to fulfil their obligations too, which includes performing well and behaving appropriately along the way.

If you keep in mind the principles of honesty, accountability and follow-through, you’ll hopefully be able to help them get to where they want to go.

And even if the team is unable to support or provide for their aspirations, they’ll at least know that you were trying to support them along the way.

How do you lead ambitious employees? Let me and all the thoughtful leaders know in the comments!