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At Nous, we believe in the sustaining power of great organisational leadership. Over the past two years, we have launched the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), a leadership model and development program that articulates the core principles of effective leadership at Nous. Developing NLW has prompted Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton to think more broadly about the challenges of great leadership, the attributes of great leaders, and how we think about these at Nous.
Every day, in our workplaces or on the news, ambition – the desire and determination to achieve – is modelled for us in striking ways. All too often those models are found wanting: the modern definition of ambition, it sometimes seems, is increasingly a narrow and self-interested one.
Ambition obviously has its strong points. On the one hand, it drives creativity and innovation. A dose of ambition can be useful in a passive or risk-averse organisation. On the other hand, it can lead to excessive self-interest that compromises collective goals and projects. Ambition has the potential to damage reputations and relationships. It can become winning for the sake of winning.
What would a more expansive, open, generous notion of ambition look like? Or, to put it another way, what other ways might we conceive of achievement, and what role might ambition play within them?
Here’s our big idea
At Nous, we ask that our leaders aspire to and demonstrate “bigness”. This is one of the thirteen tenets of the Nous Leadership Way, our organisation’s leadership model and philosophy. When differentiating your thinking from the predominate orthodoxy, it is often best to make up words. “Bigness” is one of ours.
Bigness includes or contains ambition – ambition, if you like, is an essential ingredient of bigness – but is, well, bigger than that. It also encapsulates generosity, magnanimity, and a concern for the greater good. It has a greater conception of what is possible and of what achievement means.
Bigness gets beyond the narrow self-interest too often suggested by ambition, because it asks leaders to think beyond their own success. In fact, it asks them to reimagine what success actually means and looks like. It asks us to consider what we can achieve with and for our clients, and what individual and teams within Nous can achieve in their professional lives, and appeals to collective and communal satisfaction rather than to individual pride and reward.
Embodying bigness is no easy task
Embodying bigness as a leader is anything but straightforward. Exhorting colleagues and clients to constantly think bigger can be exhausting or frustrating for everyone involved. This is why, as we understand, bigness requires both head and heart.
The head part is almost self-explanatory. Bigness requires leaders to be effective strategic thinkers and be attentive (though not hostage) to the practical, political, and organisational constraints in which they work.
But it also requires – in a way that ambition alone does not – the capacity for imaginative empathy, which is another way of saying a generous heart. Leaders interested in bigness must have an understanding of where their people stand – their appetite for change, their risk tolerance, their concerns about the present, and so on – but also where they might be. They must be ambitious, in other words, for others.
And they must be able to inspire a sense of bigness, and a willingness to think big, in others. I have written previously about the importance of having a foundational philosophy for your organisation. Leaders must be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk, making it clear that their commitment to that philosophy extends outwards from them and beyond their own self-interest.
Measuring bigness
Measuring bigness is not as context specific as some other metrics of success. At Nous, we know that we’re on the right track when:
- We identify opportunities that will stretch us but not destroy us.
- We see that many people will benefit from our work, including our colleagues, our clients, their stakeholders, and the wider community.
- We generate collective energy and commitment from our ideas.
Other organisations could measure same things in their own sectors and areas of expertise.
The key point is that bigness requires a healthy dissatisfaction with the present, an optimism about what the future might hold, and a constant striving to learn, grow, and improve. In many respects, it is stasis, not smallness, that is the true antithesis of bigness.
Aspiring to bigness asks a lot of us, and it can be taxing. But the rewards are immense. Leaders who can convince their people to imagine a bigger idea of success are not only more likely to realise that success, but they’re also likely to see that success shared more widely.
There is one last point that’s worth keeping in mind: there cannot be an excess of bigness. This, too, differentiates bigness from ambition. The bigger the bigness, the better!
Get in touch to discuss how you can make embody bigness within your organisational context.
Connect with Tim Orton on LinkedIn.
This is the third article in Tim Orton's 'Exploring Great Leadership' series. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 8 April 2025. You can read the first article here.
