How to Navigate the Passage Successfully

Let’s look at how you can avoid Marissa’s problems with this passage and take advantage of how Malcolm navigated his way through it.

Like the previous two passages, this one is highly personal because it requires you to come to terms with who you are. It is impossible to navigate this passage successfully unless you grapple with what drives you and how this drive may have changed over the years. At first, you may be anxious about what you discover. In our society and especially in business, ambition is deified. To acknowledge that you no longer are striving for a better-paying job or more prestigious title may seem heretical. In reality, it can be a liberating experience that will make you a more effective leader.

To let go of ambition and replace it in a positive way, do the following:

• Accept that eventually this happens to everyone, and now it has happened to you. Years ago, psychologist David McClelland identified three basic motivational patterns: affiliation, achievement, and power. It is not unusual for affiliation to be the dominant motivator of teenage years, with achievement becoming more important during the years of career advancement. But as McClelland found, for almost everyone the desire to achieve reaches a peak, and other motivations in life then become dominant. It is a passage that almost everyone goes through, but what makes this one unique is that it often occurs long before formal retirement begins. Though they probably aren’t talking about it, many senior executives have let go of ambition. In a way, they’ve recognized that they work within a pyramid and there’s only room for one at the top. They no longer have to strive and strain to get their shot at the top job, and this gives them a kind of power they never had before.

  Acceptance is more than a passive realization that you’re content where you are. With this realization comes fear (“I’ve lost my drive”) and lethargy (“Why should I work hard?”). Talking to a trusted coach or mentor about these issues will help you move past them. A good adviser can put your experience in context, demonstrating that letting go of ambition is a lesson all leaders need to learn sooner or later. Giving up is the sign of a still-ambitious leader who has failed and can’t handle the failure.

• Redirect your energy. If you think about it, you’ll realize that the total amount of time you spend networking, schmoozing bosses, and interviewing for jobs can be days or even weeks over the course of a year. Just as significant, you invest a great deal of emotional energy in this quest, spending sleepless nights worrying about the opportunity you missed or sweating out a selection process. As an exercise, do the following:

  • Estimate the number of hours you’ve spent during the past ten years lobbying your boss for advancement, working for visibility in the organization, seeking to obtain credit for your contributions, elbowing aggressive peers out of the way, or even talking to headhunters and consultants about other opportunities.

  • Create a list of jobs that you’ve dreamed about having but never obtained and a list of jobs you were considered for but not selected.

  • Think about whether your work performance was adversely affected because of the stress and anxiety of competition—pushing for more, jockeying for position, or trying to move up. Is it possible your performance has been affected?

  If you’re like most people, this exercise will help you realize that you now have an additional amount of emotional energy and time that you can use to increase your effectiveness in any way you choose. Think about your current job and how it gives you the most satisfaction. What would you like to spend more time doing? What can you focus on that might significantly help your people or the organization as a whole? Is there a particular pet project that you’ve always wanted to tackle? These types of questions will help you determine how you can ratchet up your effectiveness when going through this passage.

• Redefine achievement. Many executives confuse ambition and achievement. They measure their success in dollars earned, titles gained, and key positions assigned. At a certain point in a career, these measurements have validity. During this particular passage, however, new measures must be created. Perhaps you start measuring achievement based on time spent doing your favorite work activity. Perhaps you measure it based on progress toward a goal you value, such as revenue booked, growth in profitability, market cap, market position, new products introduced, lawsuits won, or any other metric. Remember, too, that just because you have let go of ambition doesn’t mean you have let go of ambitious projects. Now, though, the project is not a means to an end.