Most leaders make it to the C-suite by being brilliant at something.
They’ve invested hours in cultivating a specific technical skill. They’ve trained in finance, operations, sales, marketing or company law. They’ve then become the best subject matter expert (SME) in that area. All this effort eventually resulted in them being promoted to the status of Chief Financial, Chief Operational, Chief Commercial or Chief Marketing Officer or General Counsel.
The C-suites of most organisations are full of such experts. But some leaders mature beyond their expertise. They become business leaders, not just technical experts. The impact of this change in a leader’s level of maturity can’t be underestimated. It reflects a much more profound leadership transformation.
Experts bring their technical brilliance to the table. But business leaders check their expertise at the door. Why? Because business leaders have developed the ability to objectify their technical capability. Their identity is no longer tethered to their skill set. Their value add is not confined to what they know. They’re more focused on outcomes than they are on sharing or flexing their knowledge base. They have matured from an Expert to an Achiever.
Achievers have an unrelenting focus on results. They want to win. Achievers are, in many ways, the driving force behind the commercial growth of all organisations. They make the money that makes the world go around.
Achievers are the economic engine of your business.
But what happens when Achievers achiever what they set out to achieve?
They don’t stop. They keep driving forward, compelled to achiever more. They want things bigger and better. They want more scale, more reach, more impact.
I had a coffee recently with an extremely successful male executive who’d had a stellar career in the computer and telecoms industry. He told me that he, and some of his millionaires and billionaires business friends had formed a small group. They wanted to meet and do something together that took them out of their comfort zone. So, they decided to cook meals for each other.
This was a bunch of extremely successful executives, most of whom who could barely butter toast. Given that they are all Achiever, to a man, it wasn’t long before the competitiveness kicked. Every one of them wanted to win. Each week they tried to outdo the previous host in a perpetual game of One-up Manship. Eventually, one of the guys secretly brought in outside catering to help boost his performance.
This is what Achievers do. It’s one of the main reasons why the rich get richer. No amount of wealth satisfies most Achievers. There’s always more money to make. There is always someone with a bigger stash. Such commercial compulsion is not tempered by the financial inequity it creates. It is also not tempered by the fact that all the evidence shows that beyond a basic level of wealth more wealth doesn’t increase happiness of a sense of fulfilment in life.
How Do Achievers Create Meaning
One of the reasons that Achievers are driven to just keep achieving more is that this may be the only way they create meaning for themselves. Money is a metric that’s tangible and matters in the world of Achievers.
But here’s the interesting thing, if Achievers mature just one more level, the obsession with financial success softens. Not to the extent that Achievers let go of commercial discipline or the ability to drive outcomes, but they don’t obsess about results to the exclusion of all other things.
Such a maturation was beautifully illustrated by Mark Carney book Values. Carney, the current President of Canada and previous Governor of the bank of England made this exact point in his book. He suggested that capitalism may be over emphasising financial value at the expense of social value.
This reflects his own maturation as a leader. There are six more levels of maturity beyond that of an Achiever. Each new level unlocks different capabilities and new way of creating meaning.
Pluralism, which is the next level-up beyond an Achiever starts to create meaning through relationships and context. It stars to understand that the relentless pursuit of financial outcomes is just one way of creating value and meaning but there are others. And these other way of creating meaning and value may be preferable in some circumstances.
Without this insight Achievers will spend their entire life trapped by their need to achieve and reach a result.
Pluralists can extract value from the journey not the destination.
The shift from Achiever to Pluralist is probably the greatest change in maturity a leader will every make in their career. The step up from Achiever to Pluralist is often called the “ME to WE” shift.
This is because Experts and Achievers believe in leading from the front. They won’t ask people to do anything that they themselves wouldn’t or couldn’t do. They effect change through their own knowledge (Experts) or results-focus (Achievers).
In contrast Pluralists start to develop the ability to driver results through and with others. This is a very different approach than leading from the front. It is more inclusive creates the options for a broader set of stakeholders and therefore higher quality answers.
It is potentially slower than the kind of autocratic decision making that Experts and Achievers like, but with skill this risk is easily minimised.
Pluralists are much less likely to want to control everything through. Instead, they begin to orchestrate intelligence across the system. They shift from being the smartest person in the room to creating environments where collective intelligence can emerge.
They make better strategic decisions. They build stronger leadership teams. They see risks earlier and opportunities more clearly. The organisation becomes more adaptive and resilient.
In short, they create more value.
As the world leans into an escalating set of increasingly wicked problems we need more mature leaders. And in practice this means we need more Achievers to grow up into Pluralists.
One of the most compelling reasons for Achievers to make this leap is their health, wellbeing and fulfilment. Many Experts and Achievers discover that the very capabilities that made them successful, discipline, ambition, relentless focus, can become constraints on their wellbeing. The external markers of success increase, yet internally many suffer with a lack of meaning, maybe even loneliness, or emptiness despite their material wealth.
More money rarely solves this.
How Do Pluralists Create Meaning
Creating meaning as a Pluralist doesn’t mean abandoning ambition or success. Far from it.
Rather, it involves expanding the definition of success itself.
Instead of measuring life purely in terms of outcomes, revenue, valuation, market share, Pluralists begin to include other dimensions: vitality, relationships, contribution and coherence.
The goal shifts from simply winning the game to understanding which game is truly worth playing.
This deeper inquiry is rarely triggered by theory. It usually arises from painful experience. Sometimes it is prompted by burnout. Sometimes by a crisis. Sometimes simply by the quiet recognition that external success has not delivered the internal satisfaction once imagined. Occasionally, the inquiry is triggered by bumping into someone who is creating meaning at this level of beyond this level.
When leaders embrace this developmental step, from Achiever to Pluralist, something remarkable happens.
They do not become less effective. They often become more so.
Because when identity loosens its grip on expertise, status and accumulation, leaders become freer to think clearly, act wisely and engage authentically. Their decisions become less driven by ego and more by insight.
They still create wealth.
But they are no longer defined by it.
And that is often when leadership, and life, becomes truly fulfilling.