Leadership Run Amok: The Destructive Potential of Overachievers
<aside> ✏️ Summary:
The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, and it is on the rise. The authors’ consulting firm has seen a steady increase in the extent to which achievement motivates managers. There’s a dark side to the trend, however. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals, an executive or company can damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, stifling subordinates.
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. 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. Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power.
To look at how motives and leadership style affect a group’s work climate and performance, the authors studied 21 senior managers at IBM. 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. Rather than order people around, they provided vision, sought buy-in and commitment, and coached.
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. 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. 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.
</aside>
The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, both for individual managers and for the organizations they lead. It generates passion and energy, which fuel growth and help companies sustain performance over the long term. And the achievement drive is on the rise. We’ve spent 35 years assessing executive motivation, and we’ve seen a steady increase during the past decade in the number of managers for whom achievement is the primary motive. Businesses have benefited from this trend: Productivity has risen, and innovation, as measured by the number of patents issued per year, has soared.
In the short term, through sheer drive and determination, overachieving leaders may be very successful, but there’s a dark side to the achievement motive. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals—revenue or sales targets, say—an executive or company can, over time, damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, rather than coach and collaborate, thus stifling subordinates. They take frequent shortcuts and forget to communicate crucial information, and they may be oblivious to the concerns of others. Their teams’ performance begins to suffer, and they risk missing the very goals that initially triggered the achievement-oriented behavior.
Too intense a focus on achievement can demolish trust and undermine morale, measurably reducing workplace productivity and eroding confidence in management, both inside and outside the corporation. While profits and innovation have risen during the past decade, public trust in big business has slid. In our executive coaching practice, we’ve seen very talented leaders crash and burn as they put ever more pressure on their employees and themselves to produce.
We’ve seen very talented leaders crash and burn as they put ever more pressure on their employees and themselves to produce.
At the extreme are leaders like Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, a classic overachiever by most accounts, driven by results regardless of how they were achieved. He pitted manager against manager and once even praised an executive who went behind his back to create a service he had forbidden her to develop. For every Skilling, there are dozens of overachieving managers who don’t make headlines but do cause significant harm. Consider Frank, a confident, results-oriented CEO of a large electronics manufacturer. He was so single-minded in his drive to achieve that he ran roughshod over the rest of the management team. He was arrogant, aloof, and demanding, and he never listened. In fewer than four years, with the company in disarray and members of his senior leadership team threatening to leave, he was fired.
Even if a narrow focus on achievement doesn’t get an executive fired, it can stall a career. Jan, a brilliant lawyer, was a partner and the heir apparent in a large New York law firm. But she could be mean-spirited. She didn’t tolerate colleagues who seemed less driven than she was, she treated subordinates in a demeaning manner, and she chewed up junior associates at a record pace. Opinions about her began to sour in the firm, and ultimately she was shuffled off to a small satellite office to work—usually alone—on special cases. Although she continued to woo clients and win cases, she never rose any further.
On the surface, controlling achievement overdrive sounds like Management 101: Be less coercive and more collaborative. Influence rather than direct. Focus more on people and less on numbers and results. Easy to say, difficult to master. Experienced, successful executives who should know better fall into overachievement mode again and again. In this article, we’ll offer ways for managers to identify achievement overdrive in themselves and others and keep the destructive aspects in check. But first, let’s look at the achievement motive and see how it affects the workplace.
The drive to achieve is tough to resist. Most people in Western cultures are taught from early childhood to value achievement. For some people, the drive seems innate: They don’t just know achievement is important, they feel it. Accomplishment is a natural high for them. Just ask admitted overachiever Karin Mayhew, who is senior vice president of organization effectiveness for Health Net, a large managed-care company. “I start to feel really good,” she says of those moments when her achievement drive kicks into high gear and she feels a mounting sense of accomplishment. At such times, she says, she is excited and happy.
David McClelland, the late Harvard psychologist, spent much of his career studying motivation and how it affects leadership behavior. He identified achievement—meeting or exceeding a standard of excellence or improving personal performance—as one of three internal drivers (he called them “social motives”) that explain how we behave. The other two are affiliation—maintaining close personal relationships—and power, which involves being strong and influencing or having an impact on others. He said the power motive comes in two forms: personalized—the leader draws strength from controlling others and making them feel weak; and socialized—the leader’s strength comes from empowering people. Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power; personalized power is often associated with the exploitation of subordinates. (See the exhibit “What’s Your Motivation?”)
A small set of motives, present to some extent in all people, helps explain how leaders behave. The motives ...
McClelland’s research showed that all three motives are present to some extent in everyone. Although we are not usually conscious of them, they give rise in us to needs and concerns that lead to certain behaviors. Meeting those needs gives us a sense of satisfaction and energizes us, so we keep repeating the behaviors, whether or not they result in the outcomes we desire.
McClelland initially believed that of the three motives, achievement was the most critical to organizational, even national, success. In The Achieving Society, his seminal study on the subject, first published in 1961, he reported that a high concern with achievement within a country was followed by rapid national growth, while a drop led to a decline in economic welfare. In another study, he reported a direct correlation between the number of patents generated in a country and the level of achievement as a motivation.
But McClelland also recognized the downside of achievement: the tendencies to cheat and cut corners and to leave people out of the loop. Some high achievers “are so fixated on finding a shortcut to the goal,” he noted, “that they may not be too particular about the means they use to reach it.” In later work, he argued that the most effective leaders were primarily motivated by socialized power: They channeled their efforts into helping others be successful.
We have continued McClelland’s research and assessment of managers’ and executives’ motives (we have amassed data on more than 40,000 people). We show people a series of pictures and ask them to write a story about each. Experts score the stories for imagery that indicates the presence and strength of one or more of the motives. Beginning in the mid-1990s, achievement scores began rising dramatically, while the power drive declined and affiliation stayed more or less steady. (See the exhibit “Achievement Is on the Rise.”)
We’ve seen a steady increase in the degree to which achievement is a motive for managers and ...