Ambition Vs Greed

Thank you for joining us at the Australian Institute of Insider Threat. In this video we'll explore the fine line between ambition and greed. We're going to examine how these powerful drivers can influence behaviors in the workplace. And of course I have Peter Natra with me to explain it all. Thanks, Peter.

Thanks boys.

Let's start again. What do we mean by ambition and what do we mean by greed?

So ambition, Ambition is the aspiration towards wanting to do something in the best possible way and achieve the best possible results. It's collaborative, it's forward thinking and it can be very inclusive as well too. So where you look at something like greed, it's very self focused, it's very self centered. Oftentimes you can say the two are interchangeable. It has to do with the dynamics of why are people doing, why are people turning up. So the ambitious aspirational people will be there to better themselves and better the environment, whereas people with greed will be there to better themselves.

So why is it important? What's the distinction here between these two?

Comes down to ethics and motivation.

Okay, so no, no, no, I was meaning to ask you another question. So, so if someone basically gets employed, they go in their role, are they automatically have the ambitious trait?

Yes. More than likely 90% of people who walk into a new role have the ambition or and I like to use the word aspiration to really shine, be the best that they can, and to succeed at what it is that they do.

But there's also, one can say it's true that not every person is ambitious to move up. They might be ambitious happily to stay in their role.

Absolutely. And that's their ambition. Ambitions can be set high or low or high or medium term, but there is always this driver to do the best. So perhaps you could call it an ambition to do one's best.

Okay, so what are the behavioral signs that shows that someone who's ambitious may be moving towards greed?

So when the actions become more self centered or self serving, when the actions become more about either increasing one's own power, increasing one's own wealth, increasing one's own influence, that's when the greed question mark starts to come up. When somebody starts cozying up to one of the managers, one of the higher ups, and starts becoming very much great chums with them, then you go, okay, that can be, that could be a sign of some sort of a greed thing going on because they're now greedy for influence.

Yeah. What happens? Or if for example, someone who's highly ambitious but left unchecked within an organization what vulnerabilities could that cause?

In other words, if they can get away with things. Exactly. The more people get away with things, the more they'll get away with. And look, that then becomes more self serving than it becomes, than it is advancing the cause, advancing the organization. Even though people will be very, very clever at convincing themselves that oh yes, I'm just doing this because it's best for the organization. So people can convince themselves of all sorts of things.

Yes, they can. And I was going to say, yeah, I've lost my track of thoughts. But let's talk about pressure. How does pressure play, either from an internal perspective or external perspective affect someone that may crossover from being ambitious to greed? That's what I really wanted to say.

Absolutely.

It took a while.

Pressure is always good because it moves people on down or moves people up through the competency curve. There are going to be times when you when the pressure becomes so constant and so hard that people look for shortcuts and then it becomes service to self where it becomes like, how am I going to get out of this one? How am I going to deal with this one? Rather than how are we going to do this one? What can I do to make that one. That particular issue? Project, whatever. So a large amount of pressure with many people can actually focus them inward. And once you're focused inward, the ethics are not so much around doing the right thing by the job, but doing the right thing by personal.

In what ways can greed, as opposed to ambition sort of cause the likelihood of that person exploiting the internal resources of an organization?

Whatever. So it's everything that's prized in a greedy manner has some form of currency, whether it's real dollars or not, whether it's informational, whether it's relational, whether it's whatever it is, there is some kind of currency around what it is that people gather to themselves around that. And then once they get some of that, the greed, you know that you're in agreed cycle when you want to accumulate more and more and more, you know, that's like you start earning money but all you want to do is earn more money.

Yeah, exactly.

Or you get influence and all you want is more influence.

Correct, so correct. It's sometimes a self fulfilling cycle.

Yeah, yeah it is. It's a self. Yes, self feeding cycle.

Yeah, I like feeding. How can management executives help empower ambition without fostering. Great.

So there's two answers to that. One, the management must be highly ethical. They need to be seen to be ambitious but not greedy themselves. And if you have somebody that is under your tutelage who is ambitious. There's two things, mentoring and coaching. Mentoring is, this is role modeling. That's the old fashioned term. This is how you role model things. Or this by role modeling. This is how you do things. And the second thing is coaching. Because ambition will go through cycles. It's got a bit of a sine curve to it. So you go through high moments and you go through low moments. Through the high moments is where you role model. This is how you handle success. Through the low moments. You coach people through that so that they don't flip over, lose hope, take shortcuts, go off track. That's pretty much how to manage ambitious people.

Let's talk about a situation like Wells Fargo where you have a very competitive, driven, reward driven culture. How does that impact someone who's ambitious and how does it impact someone who may be on the verge of being greedy? Because there was, Wells Fargo was a classical example of greed and try and match targets, sales targets and so forth.

So this is pretty typical of a number of management strategies where you say, look, we're just going to put so much competition inside our team and let the winners, you know, rise to the surface. Which on the face of it sounds reasonable. But what happens after a while is that that team, the team that is supposed to, to be your momentum to move forward, starts eating itself, starts becoming sabotaging to themselves. Then if somebody says, okay, well I found a shortcut, how to do that? In the case of Wells Fargo, everybody starts doing it, or a large percentage of people start doing that, then becomes an endemic problem.

Correct.

It then becomes an organizational problem.

Oh, that's what it was. Massive. How does then transparency look at it from the perspective of ambitious and greed?

So transparency will show the motivation, will show the intent. So if you're looking at a particular action and you say, but you know you did very well out of this particular transaction, how does that make the rest of the organization move forward? That kind of transparency is very important. And getting back to something previously transparency starts at management level. Management level must not just be doing the right thing, but must also be seen to be doing the right thing. Because otherwise lines blur.

That's very much so. And that's why we're talking about ambition, greed. How do we identify situations where the person has crossed over?

It's very subtle. It's very subtle. So let's just frame that by saying oftentimes people that have moved from ambitious to greediness don't even recognize it themselves. They don't even recognize it because again, we're very, very good at justifying our actions in noble terms.

So.

So by being able to look at it from. By being a person on the outside of that, by looking at that, for instance, the employee or somebody that's under your tutelage and noticing the changes and calling them out. People don't always have a perfect mirror. They see.

No, no, exactly.

They see in the mirror what they want to see.

Correct. It's their own view as well.

Exactly, exactly.

So how do you management and executive create a strategy where they compel their employees without creating that momentum to greed?

Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses. Everybody has their own areas where they need to stretch or areas where they already excel and to create environments for them where they can learn to stretch, where they can learn to. To. To. To grow in certain areas where they can flex the muscles of what they already know that they can do really well with that combination. You'll find that people's aspirations and ambitions stay within the confines within a. How can we. Within a collaborative confine rather than within a. Oh, I'm just gonna.

Yeah, I'm out.

I'm just out for me, kind of.

Correct, correct, correct. Yeah. So wrapping this all up, what is the key takeaway from this?

So ambition and greed are often hard to tell apart from each other.

It is.

Greed is more about what can I do for me as opposed to what can we do for us?

Yeah. So one is a sort of like a win lose scenario, which is greed, and the other one is more of a win, win, win.

Absolutely.

But the challenge is, you know, we talk about the shades of grey. Where exactly are they on that line?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Thanks, Pina. Thank you for watching and stay tuned for the next video. Cheers.

Cheers.