My fourth Key to an “A” is aspiration. It’s been with me for many years. In my high school commencement address, I used the following quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”[i] Years later, in reading Good to Great, I understood immediately what Jim Collins meant when he described BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals).[ii] They were Thoreau’s “castles in the air.” At least, the good BHAGs were.
Mary Pat McCarthy, vice chair of KPMG LLP when she met with the leadership class, challenged students to excel, to run toward opportunities, not away from them, reminding them, “We did not raise the bar for you to run under it.” Effective leaders raise the bar; they don’t lower it.
For organizations I led, I set stretch goals. Not all goals were achieved, but I believe greater progress resulted from striving to achieve them than would have resulted with more mediocre goals. In a newspaper profile about me, Cyd King noted, “When a goal came into sight, he raised the bar higher.
“‘He’s a hard driver. His personality is such that he doesn’t want to be second at anything,’ says Mike Thomas, former provost at Georgia Tech.”[iii]
During my years at Georgia Tech, I became a fan of Lewis Grizzard, who was a writer for the Atlanta Journal–Constitution. Grizzard also wrote numerous books, filled with humor and wisdom. His books had eye-catching titles. My favorite Grizzard book title is Shoot Low Boys – They’re Ridin’ Shetland Ponies. Too many leaders aim too low. I aimed high. I raised the bar. I set BHAGs. I built castles in the air.
In 2012, when asked if winning the 76th Masters Championship was a dream come true, Bubba Watson responded, “I’ve never had a dream go this far, so I can’t really say it’s a dream come true.”[iv] Perhaps Watson was being humble. However, his spontaneous and tearful response rang true. He exceeded his dreams. Unlike Watson, I have big dreams.
On September 12, 1962, in an address at Rice University, President John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The Apollo Lunar Module Eagle landed on the moon on July 20, 1969; on July 21, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon’s surface.[v] President Kennedy’s address captured the essence of Thoreau’s challenge.
My greatest challenge as a leader was changing attitudes and expectations. Why? Because I was usually in a position of leadership for a very good organization. Indeed, many in the organization and several members of the governing board believed the organization was good enough – believing changes weren’t needed. Yet, I knew we could (and should) do better.
As important as it is for a leader to have aspirations, it is far more important for the leader’s aspirations to be for the team, not the leader. My goal was to be the leader of the best team, not the best leader of a team. The focus must be on the team, not the leader. Judgments of leadership quality must be based on team performance, not a leader’s performance.
(Regarding exemplary leadership, because Churchill said, “The first quality that is needed is audacity,”[vi] I considered using audacity, not aspiration, for the fourth key.)
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My fifth Key to an “A” is ambition. Aspiration and ambition are very close cousins, perhaps even opposite sides of the same coin, but they’re not identical twins. Consider the following differentiation: “Aspiration is what you hope to do in life, but it is the ambition that drives you to work hard to achieve that goal.”[vii]
When aspiration is included in a leader’s list of strengths, it’s considered a good thing. However, if a leader claims to be ambitious, some people react negatively. Why? Perhaps, as I did, in high school they memorized Mark Antony’s eulogy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and remembered how Brutus portrays Caesar’s ambition negatively.[viii]
Despite what Brutus tries to convey about Caesar, being ambitious is a good thing. Wouldn’t you prefer to be led by someone with ambition than someone without it? What if the person’s ambition is for the people being led to be immensely successful? Wouldn’t you want to be led by such an ambitious person? What if the leader’s ambition is for the team to be the best it can be? I believe ambition is a good thing so long as best is measured by the team’s success. As with aspiration, what matters with ambition is the target of the leader’s ambition and how it’s manifested.
In comparing and contrasting Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, Goodwin points out, while they took different paths to the presidency and differed in attributes commonly associated with leadership, they were united “… by a fierce ambition, an inordinate drive to succeed. With perseverance and hard work, they all essentially made themselves leaders by enhancing and developing the qualities they were given.”[ix]
Regarding Lincoln, she notes that his ambition wasn’t just for himself, but also for those whom he led. She said that he possessed a sense of community and a fierce desire to gain the respect of others by accomplishing great things.[x] Although Lincoln evidenced great humility, Goodwin observes, “Such humility did not suggest a lack of ambition. On the contrary, from the time he was a young man Lincoln had harbored a consuming ambition to make a difference in the world.”[xi]
Much can be learned from Lincoln’s example. Strive to be the best leader you can be by focusing on the team. Remove I, me, and my from your vocabulary and replace them with we, us and our. Be a servant leader, not a leader to be served.
If someone had placed a limit on the number of keys I could have on my keychain, I’d probably exclude either aspiration or ambition. But which should it be? Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide, so I included both.
Next: Keys to “A”s in Leadership–Part IV (Availability and Accountability)
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[i] See https://www.goodreads.com.
[ii] Jim Collins, Good to Great, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 2001, pp. 202-204.
[iii] Cyd King, “Always raising the bar: John Austin White Jr,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sunday, October 28, 2001, pp. 1D, 4D.
[iv] See https://www.golfchannel.com/news/bubba-watson-wins-it-style.
[v] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo 11.
[vi] See https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/winston-churchill-quotes.
[vii] See https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-ambition-and-vs-aspiration/.
[viii] William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 70-104.
[ix] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2018, p. xii.
[x] Ibid, pp. 3-4.
[xi] Ibid, p. 241.
