Lead from within. Self-knowledge is empowering. Lead from the inside out. Leadership starts with self-awareness. These are easy phrases to say and to remember, but the ego can make it hard to stay on the right track and to do the right thing unless we work on personally developing ourselves as leaders.
What Animal Do You Feed?
After interviewing 100 thought leaders for my book, “Leading with Wisdom: Sage Advice from 100 Experts,” one conclusion was the “ego is not your amigo.” While it is important to have an ego in order to lead, an out-of-control ego can create a toxic environment for everyone. When the ego takes over, it manifests in negative behaviors such as defensiveness, envy, over-competitiveness, jealousy, and greed. This often is referred to as the shadow or dark side of leadership.
A healthy ego—the light side—enables us to have confidence, speak our truth, and do the right things for the right reasons. Psychotherapist David Richo, a leading authority on ego development, has an interesting way of describing this. “It is as if we are walking through life with a dog on one side and a wolf on the other… The more you feed the dog, the more good comes through you. The more you feed the wolf, the more evil or negative potential comes through.” It is essential to pay attention to the animal you feed the most.
Practice Humility
Leadership development begins with self-knowledge and insight. It is important to understand one’s strengths, but when applied to an extreme, these abilities can become liabilities. One way to keep the ego in check is to practice humility. In his classic book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Other Don’t,” Jim Collins defines outstanding leaders as exceedingly humble. They’re willing—even eager—to give others praise and credit for a job well done. When projects don’t go as planned, they’re reflective enough to assign blame to themselves.
Sportswriter Don Yaeger told a story about famous UCLA basketball coach John Wooden on the podcast, Elevate with Robert Glazer. “Wooden had a rule. When you scored a basket, your immediate role on your way down the floor was to turn to the player who passed you the ball and acknowledge them. One of the great players said, ‘What if the person is not looking at me?’ Coach Wooden made it clear that ‘if you’re going to acknowledge your teammate, trust me—they’ll be looking.’”
Developing leaders is really about developing yourself. The most important person to lead is yourself. Would you follow yourself?
