How Should We Understand Ambition as Aspiring Leaders?
Written by Mia Strickland
Ambition should never overshadow purpose. When our desire to achieve becomes greater than our commitment to the communities we hope to serve, leadership risks becoming centred on the leader rather than the people whose lives they hope to improve. Increasingly, I have come to think that ambition is only ethical when it is willing to change. It must be shaped by listening, grounded in humility, and continually redirected by the needs of others rather than our own ideas of success. Over the past year, the Laidlaw programme has challenged me to reconsider not only what I hope to achieve, but why I hope to achieve it.
One of the most formative experiences during my Leadership in Action placement came while volunteering with Tzu Chi at a refugee hotel near Heathrow. I expected the day to be centred around distributing vouchers. Instead, the conversation I had beforehand with Wilson, who leads much of Tzu Chi's work in London, stayed with me far longer than the practical task itself. Wilson explained that this was not the organisation's first visit to the hotel. Their initial response had been much like a traditional food drive, bringing tinned goods and bread to residents. Afterwards, however, volunteers spoke with the refugees and realised that providing identical food parcels assumed everyone's needs were the same. In response, Tzu Chi changed its approach, replacing food parcels with vouchers for a nearby supermarket so families could choose the items that were most useful to them. Yet even that solution was not considered final. Further conversations revealed that limiting people to a single shop still restricted choice. By the time I joined the project, the organisation had moved to digital vouchers that could be redeemed across several local retailers, allowing families greater flexibility and, as Wilson described it, greater dignity.
What struck me was not simply that the programme had improved, but how it had improved. Every change came because the organisation had listened. Its ambition was never tied to delivering a particular initiative or being seen to provide the answer. Instead, it was driven by a willingness to ask what people actually needed and to adapt accordingly. The refugees were not passive recipients of support but active agents in shaping it. That experience challenged assumptions I had not realised I held. Leadership is often described as solving problems for others, yet the most meaningful leadership I witnessed did something quite different. It recognised that communities rarely need saving. More often, they need people who are willing to stand beside them, listen carefully, and support the priorities that communities identify for themselves. Ethical ambition, therefore, is not measured by how much we do for others, but by how willing we are to let others reshape the way we serve.
This lesson has also transformed the way I think about my own research. My interest in Sarawakian history began for deeply personal reasons. Growing up with Sarawakian heritage, I wanted to understand a part of my own family's history that I had never fully explored. That curiosity gradually became the reason I chose to leave engineering and study history instead. At first, I imagined research as a process of uncovering forgotten stories. As I spent more time reading colonial records, exploring existing historiography, and speaking with people in Sarawak, I realised that these stories had never been lost at all. Sarawak's communities possess an extraordinary richness of history, culture, and oral tradition. The challenge is not that these stories have disappeared, but that they have too often been overlooked within dominant historical narratives. That realisation changed my understanding of what my own role as a researcher should be. My ambition is not to create stories that already exist, nor to speak on behalf of communities whose histories they know far better than I ever could. Rather, I hope to support the process of bringing those histories into wider historical conversations. By combining archival research with oral histories, I want to understand how communities themselves experienced and negotiated colonial rule while allowing their perspectives to sit alongside official records instead of beneath them.
Looking back, I realise the same principle underpins both experiences. Whether working alongside refugee communities or researching colonial history, meaningful leadership begins by recognising that the people closest to an issue are often those best placed to shape its future. Our responsibility is not to replace their voices with our own, but to create opportunities for those voices to be recognised.
I was reminded of this again during our Leadership in Action visit to Makespace. Peter Cassell, an AI engineer and a long-term member of MakeSpace, explained that Makespace had not begun with an ambitious vision of creating one of Cambridge's most vibrant community workshops. It began because two groups of people wanted to share the cost of resources. Over the following decade, that simple act of cooperation grew into a thriving community filled with people from different backgrounds, professions and interests. I found that story surprisingly reassuring because it echoed my own journey. My move from engineering into history was not driven by a carefully constructed career plan. It came from following questions that felt increasingly meaningful and allowing those questions to change the direction I was heading. Likewise, Makespace did not become successful because someone imposed a vision from above. It grew because people remained responsive to one another and continued choosing generosity over individual ownership. Communities, like ambitions, are rarely built all at once. They develop gradually through trust, collaboration, and a willingness to keep listening.
Reflecting on these experiences has also changed how I understand where ambition should act. We often associate ambition with large-scale change, believing that the greater the problem, the greater the ambition required to solve it. Yet the most significant lessons I have learned this year have all come from local communities. They have come from conversations around tables, from shared meals, from community workshops, and from listening to people explain what would genuinely make a difference in their everyday lives. Global challenges undoubtedly require international cooperation, but those solutions are built from countless local relationships grounded in trust.
Before joining Laidlaw at E-Lab, many of my ideas about leadership were theoretical, or rooted in my educational environments. I had encountered them in books, lectures, and biographies of remarkable individuals. Leadership in Action has been different because it has required me to spend time within communities rather than simply thinking about them. It has shown me that ethical leadership cannot be developed entirely through reflection; it must also be shaped by experience. It must be shaped by being willing to have our assumptions challenged and by recognising that the communities we hope to serve often have the clearest understanding of what they need. For me, this has been the most valuable lesson of the programme.
Ambition only becomes meaningful when it is grounded in lived experience. Without that experience, it is easy to mistake our own intentions for other people's needs. Working alongside Tzu Chi, learning from Makespace, and reflecting on the future of my own research have all reminded me that leadership is not about arriving with answers. It begins by asking better questions, listening carefully to the responses, and allowing those answers to reshape our ambitions. If I carry one lesson with me beyond Laidlaw, I hope it is this: that the measure of ambition is not how much we achieve ourselves, but whether the communities we work alongside feel better able to achieve the futures they want for themselves.
Mia Strickland is an undergraduate student reading History at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Previously a student of Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College London, Mia hopes to combine her passion for sciences and humanities to tackle her research in Sarawakian history which has long been neglected by Eurocentric approaches to Southeast Asia. By conducting research that combines archival material, such as administrative records and personal diaries, with oral histories, she hopes to examine how Sarawak’s communities understood and negotiated Brooke rule and the possible impact it has had on political movements in the state today.