Managing Ambition

The Need for Achievement

The need for achievement has three components: drive, control, and power. Your work is important to you, and it is important for you to get things done your way and to have authority over others. What distinguishes leaders who are driven by their need for achievement is their desire to be in charge and a strong, internalized ethic of hard work—from themselves and others. They push themselves and their team. They create an intense, sometimes exhausting environment. As with the components of competitiveness, these components can play out as extreme and overly ambitious, or moderate and appropriately ambitious.

Drive

When ...