Managing Ambition

The Need for Competence

The need for competence has three components: superiority, competitiveness, and pride. It is important for you to be an expert in what you do, to win, and to be confident in your capabilities. More than anything, what distinguishes leaders driven by their need for competence is the desire to get it right—each and every time. They want to be experts in whatever jobs they tackle. These components can play out as extreme and overly ambitious, or moderate and appropriately ambitious.

Superiority

When you take superiority to its extreme, you take satisfaction from feeling morally and intellectually better than others. It’s extremely ...