Leadership and Ego

For this month's featured column, let's take a look at the complex topic of leadership and what we commonly refer to as "ego." What is a healthy leadership ego? How much ego is "too much" ego? What about not having enough ego? Here are some thoughts, based on a few hundred formal assessments and my work with coaching clients:

Confidence versus Arrogance
In English, the word "ego" is used to connote a range of things. It can be used in a positive, perhaps more clinical context ("healthy ego") and in a negative, perjorative context (too much or overbearing) "ego." This confuses the conversation and tends to confuse people's thinking on the subject. Before we even get rolling on the topic of ego, it's important to point out these divergent uses of the word "ego." In this discussion, I mean by ego a person's sense of the self and one's own capacities. A healthy ego for a leader includes a great deal of self-confidence, where confidence assumes a kind of unassumed and unexamined, default position in the world. . . a reflex one does not have to cultivate or self-consciously assert. This level of confidence in the ideal leader goes above and beyond what is common and still healthy among the vast majority of people. However, this same level of uncommon self-confidence will sometimes be perceived as arrogance by others, and sometimes they will be right. In fact, we label as "arrogance" any manifestation of self-confidence we find unpalatable. We may or may not be right in perceiving a strong ego that way. Sometimes our perceptions say more about us than they do about those we may observe.

Competitiveness and Ego
Competition is good. Leaders like to compete. They like to set benchmarks and goals for themselves and others, preferring measurement against external standards to assessments based on mere activity or effort. Confident people like to compete. On the other hand, competitive people whose drive to compete leads them to burn bridges or lack empathy for other people, perhaps even devaluing others and their talents, make poor leaders. It's not that strong leaders don't like competition, but strong leaders also possess the interpersonal awareness and skills to know how to compete in ways that do not undermine or break trust with others. Strong leaders hate to lose and may not always be graceful losers, but they learn to temper their reactions so as not to break faith with others. This is always a complicated balance to sustain for any strong leader. The bottom line is, healthy egos prefer competition and external standards through which to measure - and improve - performance.

The Desire to be "The Best"
I've never met a strong leader who did not strive to be the best at what they do. Healthy egos may not advertise that they want to be the best, or that they believe they are the best, but more often than not, this is what high perfomers believe or strive to become. I've heard some people suggest that this drive to be the best is necessarily a sign weakness or insecurity, but it's not. True, some insecure people try to overcompensate for a lack of talent by pushing too hard to do what they cannot, but the difference here is in the amount of talent at one's disposal, not in the actual desire to be the best.

The Wisdom to Know How to Be the Best as Leader
Strong leaders aspire to be great leaders and therefore study how to improve. As they discover that they become better leaders by surrounding themselves with highly talented people who are probably more talented in one or another area of performance than they are themselves, leaders accept the need to help others shine while connecting and guiding collective effort. This means that great leaders have a very strong ego but are willing to sublimate that ego to developothers' talent and shine the spotlight on other highly able people. While there are good leaders with less competitive fire who find it easy to shine the spotlight on others, encouraging them and promoting their growth, they tend not to bring about the very best results. They just lack the drive, the fire in the belly, to do so. On the other hand, highly competitive people don't always find it in themselves to sacrifice some degree of attention, the need to be seen as the star, in order to become the best leaders who make other people great. Those who possess both the drive to be the best and the wisdom to sublimate their desire to be noticed make the best leaders. That takes a kind of wisdom to manage one's own ego toward productive ends.

Gender and Leadership Ego
In the West, we accept women as leaders a bit more than is generally done elsewhere, but even here, we're subject to common misperceptions and biases regarding women as leaders. Strong competitive, bold behaviors exhibited by men are often labelled and perceived quite differently when they are exhibited by women. We are less tolerant of a strong, competitive leadership egos among women than we are among men. Some women do possess the drive to be the best, and in my experience, women are no less talented as leaders than are men, even if they may face more significant social hurdles to establish credibility as leaders. Thankfully, more women are overcoming the habit of underestimating their own talents as generations pass. We know from research that current leaders are more likely to identify and mentor young talent that reminds them of themselves, and so, when current leaders are mostly men, this means men get fast-tracked more than women do. When some men mentor women, the dynamics of gender can make a minfield of the process, especially when some men really have. . . other agendas in mind. It's very helpful for strong, accomplished women to mentor other women, though it's certainly possible for men to mentor women as well. It just requires a greater degree of self-awareness on the part of the male mentor, and a semsitivity to the special barriers to social legitmacy women face when taking on leadership roles.

Did Gandhi Have A Big Ego?
Anyone who believes the fate of his country rests on whether or not he eats has a huge ego. And yet, Gandhi is seen as humble, and rightly so, for he put the interests of the people of his country above his own survival, and carried himself with great self-effacement of demeanor. I use this example to illustrate something about a leader's ego: strong leader's have huge self-confidence, and yet, they put their competitive energy and passion to the service of higher ends involving people or causes greater than themselves.

Are Selfish Ends Bigger than Larger Goals?
This brings us to my final point about great leadership ego: no matter how confident a leader may be in himself and his talents (or herself and her talents, let's not forget!), the most effective ones channel their efforts to causes and missions greater than their own personal ambition. People will follow a strong, moderately selfish leader out of convenience or self interest, but people will (in some cases, literally) walk thourgh fire for leaders with strong values and ethics whose mission is ultimately to serve others in some fashion. A healthy, strong leadership ego is at once self-aware without being highly self-regarding. People know the difference. They always know the difference.