On the surface, Ambition and Selflessness seem contradictory attributes and can, indeed, work at cross-purposes within a team. However, properly managed, they can work together to improve team effectiveness.
Ambition
Who doesn't want an ambitious developer or a whole team of them? A good amount of ambition in a developer gets you someone eager to learn and produce. They're often looking for better ways to do things and bringing their manager a host of ideas. This is the kind of ambition that helps drive teams to success and developers to high-performance evaluations.
Too much ambition can lead to a developer or team cherry-picking the best and most interesting work while leaving other things to languish until the last minute or later. This sort of ambition is self-serving and detrimental to the organization. A developer like this on a team can demoralize the rest of the team if the behavior is allowed to go on unchecked, just like a ball hog on a basketball team quickly loses favor with the rest of the team, even if they continue to win.
Too little ambition often manifests as lethargy and apathy within the team and its members. You'll see simple tasks taking a long time and tickets not moving at a proper pace across your board. If you're measuring your team's happiness, I'm sure you're not seeing great scores. And the feedback you get from your team is minimal.
Selflessness
The other side of the coin is Selflessness. Again, every dev manager would love a team of devs who are happy to do whatever is needed to be done to get the project completed. No task is too small or mundane to warrant their attention and skill. This is the kind of selflessness we should all hope to embody and engender within our teams.
The detriment of an overabundance of selflessness shows itself when team members always defer to others. Often, a dev will say/think something like "I'm sure Bob's idea is better so we'll go with his" or "Divya has more experience so I won't say anything." This kind of selflessness is directly related to a lack of confidence, something I talked about here.
Oddly enough, too much selflessness will look almost like too little. You'll have developers deferring to each other with eagerness. Your team members will go out of their way to avoid stepping on each other's toes. The result is a team that is hamstrung or even paralyzed for fear of offending each other.
Finding the Balance
For many developers and teams, it's often easier for a manager to rein in an overabundance of ambition than to build it up. Depending on your management style, you can use a firm hand to force your ball-hog developer to not pick the best tasks or you can work with them to understand why it's important for the rest of the team, especially junior members, to do some of the interesting things. I fall firmly in the second camp and work to help them become an ally in building up the rest of the team.
When you've got a ball hog who won't share, you may have an issue of trust between them and the rest of the team. Perhaps he doesn't trust the team due to an earlier event. Perhaps he's never trusted the team. Working with the team to create trust can remedy this situation before you're forced to churn a high-performer.
I once had a developer like this who took extreme ownership of the product and never learned to trust the rest of the team, despite being part of the interview process for the other team members. Ultimately, the developer elected to leave the team rather than adjust to working effectively with the team.
A lack of ambition is a sign of a lack of engagement. Is your team invested in what they're doing? Do they see the value they deliver? Are they acknowledged for their work? Nothing can sap the will of a team than being constantly criticized and not having their work recognized. Additionally, if the team doesn't understand the value they're delivering, motivation will be very low. As a manager, you can solve the latter problem quicker by showing the team how their contributions make a difference in the company. And you can work to gain them recognition for the work they've produced, although this usually takes longer to rectify.
If you've got an overabundance of selflessness, you should ask yourself if your team has a problem engaging in healthy conflict. Patrick Lencioni has a great discussion about healthy conflict in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I won't dive into details here but suffice it to say a team needs to be able to have conflicts and resolve them to be truly effective.
A lack of selflessness, as I mentioned above, is often due to a lack of confidence. Helping a developer, or a team, develop confidence may be one of the hardest struggles a development manager can face. Use your 1-on-1's to build the confidence of each member individually. Use the sprint retrospectives to celebrate team achievements. Consider dialing back their workload if the team is having trouble delivering a full sprint.
Conclusion
Ambition and Selflessness are two lenses you can use to look at your team and its constituent members to see what's going on. By analyzing where you have a lack or too much, you can gain an understanding of why your team is performing at its current level.
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