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What are your experiences with leadership and ego?
Does leadership imply ego? Does it require ego? What are good characteristics of either? Can leadership be altruistic? Can ego and altruism co-exist? Or do all leaders function from a place of self-interest?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this.
Dude in a leadership position in corporate here. I come from a dirty kid background, think the ruffians with the dog and the pack on the side of the exit types. I forced my way into management after hitting my enough point with boots-on-necks and ended up working my way up the ladder. That was many moons ago, I’m now old and housed, but it’s context for my thoughts here.
I can’t speak from a political leadership experience, but from a corporate role, my ethos has been to steer the ship towards treating employees with kindness, leniency, and respect. There are days where I have to remind myself that I can’t just rest on my laurels and it’s my job to use my powers to actually force change for the better. That goal alone requires ego, or at least near-delusional confidence because it goes against most managerial practices.
I think it’s important to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy egos though. Ego, for me at least, means I’m smart enough, capable enough, and forceful enough to make waves in an industry that says otherwise. I think that kind of confidence can be a force for altruism, but it requires a lot of self-reflection without navel gazing, and mindfulness to regulate it.
It’s easy to use standard leadership practices that follow the train, coach, PIP, and fire pipeline that we’re all used to, and that route is the fastest path to upward mobility. But, if you’re feeling spicy and the spark hits, there’s definitely gratification in bucking HR and exec decisions that aren’t helpful or kind to your people, and the ego still gets a boost along the way.
I don’t know if that helps since it’s 100% anecdotal, but figured I’d throw in my two cents.
What was your first big break into "leadership" or managing others? I'd love to learn more about your experiences and what you were able to capitalize on. Any tips as you reflect back, pitfalls to avoid, bitter learning lessons, etc.?
Ohh, good question. My background was tech support to start out with, which probably fueled the distaste for bad management practices and began a long quest researching other KPIs that could be used, management styles, call center metrics, etc.
I was pulled into a pilot program because they just needed a warm body in a seat and it turned out to be the Wild West of what we were allowed to do. I spent most of those days slowly changing expectations and quietly building connections with people who were sympathetic to the idea we could be something better than what we were. Several roles later and a lot more research into management and I landed where I am now, with both direct and indirect reports underneath.
Looking back, I probably should have networked harder - conferences, white papers, etc. I’m happy with my team and the position I’m in now, but I would have liked to have a bigger network of sympathetic managers, especially during the great resignation. Workers had a lot more power and we could have gone farther with changing the landscape. Unionizing in tech is next to impossible and management is, understandably, excluded, but there was briefly a wave where if there had been enough of us, anyone with a direct report could have pushed for better working conditions overall despite the lack of unions. There’s gotta be a coalition of us managerial weirdos somewhere, right?
Bitterest lesson was absolutely learning you can do everything possible to be the loudest voice in the room for your people and still lose. I’ve had to let go of good, kind people because despite pushing upwards for change, they themselves weren’t in a role that matched their skills or abilities.
I’m man enough to admit I’ve cried at my desk after letting someone go who didn’t deserve it, and it was because that I made a bad hiring decision. Those moments radically changed my hiring approach and taught me the toughest lessons yet on accountability. My decisions absolutely impact the livelihoods of my people and it’s my responsibility to keep my people safe, starting with hiring for the right fit in a career move for them that lasts.
How do you end up in leadership with a (stated?) goal of bucking the traditional leadership norms?
Basically, my question comes from some of my experiences where my revulsion of corporate double-speak and other "norms" has made me a bit of a pariah with management, and even got me let go once.
Oh, I’ve absolutely been fired before because I couldn’t reconcile what the asks were with the way it would impact my team. It’s a risk I’m willing to take, and one that my husband and I have built into the budget long term. Always have enough money in savings to fight and be financially prepared enough to lose.
There is doublespeak that comes with it. Just no way around that fact these days. Much of it revolves around using corporate lingo to change goals or roadmaps in a way that positively impact the team, ie hardline stances on healthy deadlines, allocating budgets to hire the right and more people, changing OKRs to reflect on product improvement over useless productivity metrics. I’m a data guy by nature so I pull as much empirical evidence into the planning discussions as I can, run experiments with small groups of team members that shows a focus change makes positive impacts, use hackathons to build internal tools that make everyone’s lives easier, that kind of thing.
I got lucky getting here because people above me believed me that I could run a team well, largely due to previously referenced near-delusional confidence. There are days where I sit in meetings and feel like I need a shower afterwards, sure, and days where budgets still get cut, where I deliver news of the grim reaper and lose good members of the team, where we don’t win. But it’s a long game I’m playing, so I stick with it. And, if needed, bring out the old “fuck you, fight me” when I need.
No, leadership does not imply ego nor require it. Leadership can be altruistic, and it should be. Those who ascribe to trait theory would likely argue that ego is what makes a leader. This theory was developed in the early 20th century and is generally dismissed because of its lack of causation, its lack of consideration of situational factors, and its lack of consideration for cultural differences.
The common leadership theories that dominate today are transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and servant leadership.
Servant leadership is the theory that most directly challenges the premise that leaders must be egotistical and selfish.
Servant Leadership is what I aspire to embody. In every org I work with I try to determine how I can be 'of service' to the team to maximize their potential (from both a business and personal growth perspective). The business needs X, the person needs Y. How can we make sure the activities of the individual meet in the middle and both succeed? It takes a lot of personal soul searching and a general sense of what people want out of their lives (leisure time, money, career development, acknowledgement of their achievements, etc). This is where strong interpersonal skills are more key and most importantly, radical empathy. Even if you don't agree with the person and they rub you the wrong way, you always have to try and take a moment and write out why they would justifiably be the way they are instead of writing them off.
I'm a student of leadership, but its by far one of my favorites topics of study.
I find this question very interesting. I work at a facility that has a lot of childcare jobs, and over the years I've worked most of them. I am also very good at my job. Like top 1% of staff. The consistent compliment I get is "you're so good with kids!" I think there's a lot of different factors going on, but the important part is I can really handle kids.
A lot of staff struggle with kids. They're 16 years old, it's their first job, and it's hard to wrangle 4 kids at once. For years, I just kept my head down, made sure my own lessons were good, and accepted the compliments. As time went on, I started becoming uncomfortable with this. The lack of quality of the other lessons. And a big part of it wasn't that those teenagers were inherently bad people. They just needed a LOT of guidance, and they weren't getting it. So I started stepping in, helping out new and younger staff, trying to make sure every kid that walked through the doors got a good experience.
It's very hard to do that if you are not the actual boss on that shift. So I started asking to be promoted, for about a year. I got no luck, and eventually quit. This summer, I got offered a leadership position in a different part of the facility, running summer camps. I would be (I am) in charge of a bunch of 15-16 year olds, and helping them help these kids. And its so cathartic. After years of trying to help while not being in a position of leadership, actually being in charge flows so much better.
I will say that I have a bit of an ego. I don't know if it counts, because I am actually good at this specific task. I think the big difference is I still want to be the lowest rung on the ladder. I still want to be the counselor, they are the ones interacting with kids the most. I am aware, however, that I can help more by taking a step back, and offering guidance. I know that I'm the exception tho, and I do have to maneuver around a LOT of people who have let the power go to their heads.
You're amazing. I've always struggled with kids, and avoided any jobs that dealt directly with them. But when you're a teenager (or at least when I was!) babysitting was the way to make money. I still feel bad, decades later, that I want able to figure out how to do better for the kids I was in charge of. I wasn't terrible to them, but I guarantee they don't remember me as anyone except the passive watcher who gave them food and timed their television use. I even took a "babysitting course" but it focused on procedures and safety, with nothing about making connections with children.
Decades later...! I was recently in a hospital job where we had kids going in and out frequently, and while it wasn't my job to interact with them, my position was one that had a mix of busy and sitting around waiting to be busy times. I felt really bad for the parents because of course the kids were often stressed, sick, or scared, and I could see how hard it was on the parents trying to regulate their children's emotions for them while being worried about their health, and guilty about having to make them go through what the kids saw as torture! ...so I started trying to make the kids smile a bit as they came in. I'd greet the parent but also give the kid a hello. They played strange, so I changed tactics. Greet the parent, then skip greeting the kid, and instead leap straight to picking out things to have a short conversion about. A cute piece of clothing, a toy, a hairstyle - "I love dinosaurs too! Which one is your favorite?" "Wow, I love your blue hair! Did you pick it out yourself?"anything I thought might help break the ice. It took me until now to realize that instinctively, I was working toward helping them feel connected to the people in the building from the very start, and like they were a part of the process rather than a thing to be moved around and made uncomfortable or hurt.
The conversation starters worked far more often, and after that I began trying to distract them if they started fussing near me, just trying to get them to forget crying and get interested in something, or I'd try to reinforce parental requests by making encouraging comments about what good helpers they were, etc. It didn't always work - but it did enough that I have several really fond memories of the interactions I had. I'm so proud I figured it out on my own... but also I wish like hell I'd had someone like you around when I was a teenager to help me know what I was doing and why I was doing it!
In my experience it certainly seems easier to enter a place of leadership with ego. With ego seems to come decisiveness, which of course is a good quality for a leader. The flipside to that--how good those decisions are--determine how good a leader that person is. We get bad leaders when they make poor decisions, but not poor enough to remove them from leadership. Being a leader means that everyone else suffers/benefits from your actions.
With ego can also come selfishness, which of course is a terrible quality in a leader. If your actions affect everyone, but you give the impression that you're making these decisions for your own interest, how does that affect the trust your team puts in you? If your team doesn't trust you, how can you expect to realize your goals?
A good leader to me recognizes that success is a concerted effort, and that egoism (especially towards their own team) gets in the way. So while egoism often correlates with the qualities we see in leaders, it's not necessary for good leaders to be egotistical.
On being promoted to leadership, I think it has a lot to do with the current culture. For better or worse, people often promote the people they like. If a self-centered egotistical person is in charge, they're probably more likely to promote someone similar to themselves, since they see that as the 'qualities' of a leader. And the cycle continues.
I think the definition of what a 'good' leader is really matters here as well--A good leader to someone who doesn't manage anyone might look different to an executive leader. Finally, I think everyone to an extent functions from a place of self-interest, which isn't necessarily bad. So yes, I do think all leaders function from a place of self-interest, but the degree to which that interest drives their decisions is very important.
No, I would say ego is the mark of a bad leader. They will always choose themselves and thus place all the negatives (risks, blame, consequences) they can on everyone else's backs. They are poor learners and often have some very bigoted ideas because it's an easy, no-effort way to build yourself up in your own mind by tearing down others.
A good leader is one that is truly passionate about trying to reach down and help others rise with them. They will fight for better benefits and wages, argue for programs and solutions that will have no effect on them because they know how it will help others, work alongside the people they lead to understand processes better, and seek out opinions and thoughts from others in order to gain more nuanced opinions or decisions.
Interestingly, I've known our worked for/with several leaders in the former category who are firmly convinced they're the latter. They'll sit in the lunchroom with their part time, minimum wage, no benefits employees and brag about their sixth vacation of the year, or show off the new ring (of 10) their spouse bought them on a business trip, or talk about the top of the line massage recliner they just bought. Once, one told me a long, detailed, creepy story about their breasts. They thought they were being witty. I thought about ways to eat my lunch without having to risk using the lunch room.
Edit: I like to write before reading other comments as I like my thoughts to be mine, but having read that of the others, I'm interested to know what people would say is the difference between ego and confidence. To me the former implies self interest and the inability to heed outside advice even if that comes with a cost - I'm sure I need name no names to suggest a couple recent extreme examples. Confidence, meanwhile, is being secure enough in your own abilities and talents to know that you will never know everything and therefore to be secure enough to seek knowledge, advice or information from outside your own experience or inner circle.
My last boss was all ego and it’s exactly as you described. No responsibility in general, constant bragging, yet shorting the few dedicated employees they had every chance they could get.
What drove me crazy was that he really thought he knew everything, and couldn’t bear to be challenged on any of it. Everything turned into an argument. I’m borderline traumatized by it and now the idea of conflicts in future workplaces terrifies me.
He was a real pioneer in his field too, and is quite well known in those circles. He could have been a great mentor if not so greedy and self absorbed. The experience of it all made me switch careers entirely.
My experience has been that it is critically important to increasingly control my ego the more responsibility/authority I have. It was great when I was a young upstart to walk around like I was all that, but now I have actual power over people and it is just not appropriate. You have to be humble as you rise because people are delicate and precious. It is almost impossible to really understand how much power you have. If you are not constantly thinking of how to bless, protect, and lift up others it’s frighteningly easy to do damage to hearts, minds, or even careers.
I would estimate that for every ego-driven person I have met in a leadership role, I have also met someone driven by genuine desire to help, and although there were plenty of people in positions of power due to ambition, there were also plenty of people who found themselves in leadership roles because of their passion for what they did.
I also think there were good and bad leaders from both camps. An ego-driven leader who thrives on knowing they help make a difference is still better than an ego-driven person who gets off on petty power exercises or plays favourites.
Similarly, someone who is passionate and is able to help others connect to that passion too, is much better than someone who treats their leadership responsibilities as a burden to be avoided as much as possible.
I am intolerant of aggressive or hurtful leadership. It's not that I'm stubborn; it's more than I just cannot cope with that kind of emotional pressure. I experience a mental block and it's like I physically can't return to an environment where that person exists. However, I do not show this outwardly (I just listen calmly and move another step closer to suddenly disappearing one day), and so it surprises people and makes them think I am stubborn.
In any case, the result of this is that I tend to end up in healthy work environments, and I excel in them because I am highly self-motivated when I feel secure and independent.
A pattern I have seen is that the best leaders (at least for someone like me) tend to be genuinely empathetic people who kind of fell sideways into leadership because someone needed to do it and it somehow fell on them, but they often don't enjoy it, often think they aren't very good at it, and often kind of try not to do it (for example, they'll try include everyone else in decision-making because they feel uncomfortable making decisions for others). Despite this, or maybe because of it, they do the task extremely well, and their teams tend to be very happy and put out particularly high-quality work.
However, people who require a lot of firmness or direction to get their work done tend to do poorly in such groups and irritate the rest of us. I guess they would do better with a more aggressive, hierarchical leader; so I suppose the truly best leader would be someone who can tune their leadership style to each individual in the team.
In practice, though, I don't know that I've ever met someone who can do this well (especially since people who are sensitive to being the subject of aggression are generally also sensitive to seeing other people be the subject of aggression, even if it is needed/deserved; that, at least, is the case for me). I think some people just aren't very compatible and shouldn't be on the same team.
It's very easy for management to be a place where people with ego want to be, so they collect there.
It's also very easy for subordinates to interpret a decision as ego driven, so they assume the worst.
I've been on both sides of this dynamic and am quite happy to choose the subordinate side - but I'm very glad I had a few years as a manager and now look much more kindly at the decisions of those above me.