One of the challenges that any high performance employee has to face is the decision about whether to continue pursuing additional responsibility. For high performers, responsibility is a narcotic. And like other narcotics, responsibility can take a toll on your body as well as those who love you. At some point, you may decide that you need to break the addiction. How do you decide that you are content with the responsibility you have and your ambition for more responsibility has peaked? Here are some suggestions for this very tough decision:
- Do an honest assessment of your influence. Is your influence based on your experience, judgment, and intellect? Do you think you need to have more responsibility to be influential? If those above you respect you and you have a great impact on their decisions, then additional responsibility may not be that important. If you feel you don’t have the influence you should have, then you may want to seek additional responsibility.
- Think of other ways you can impact the organization. If you find as much satisfaction in developing and mentoring others as you do in having a title and responsibility, you may have reached a point where contentment becomes more important than ambition.
- When you update your profile each year, think of the bullets you add for your most recent accomplishments. If the bullets that come quickly to mind represent “growth accomplishments” (e.g. new initiatives, growth in sales, acquisition), you are probably still in the ambition phase of your career.
- Think about what you are really missing from your current schedule. What would you have liked to have spent more time on? If those activities represented new initiatives you wish you could have gotten to, then you are probably still in the ambition phase of your career. If your activities had more of a legacy focus, then you are probably in the content phase of your career. Legacy activities are such things as developing others, and strengthening current activities so they can be sustained.
You will notice that money and power are not mentioned in the above recommendations. These should have minimal influence in weighing the ambition/contentment decision.
