Ego in Leadership

Should you always suppress it?

This post is a collaboration with my good friend and colleague Matt Holford, Senior Director of Engineering at Etsy and former Chief Technology Officer of DoSomething.org, the largest organization exclusively for young people and social change. 

English speakers started using “ego” to mean “a sense of self-importance” around the early 20th century, as Sigmund Freud’s works were translated into English. Although Freud represented his original concept in German as simply “das Ich,” or “the I,” English speakers learned this as “ego,” and almost immediately attached to it a negative connotation.

Many of us are taught as young leaders that our ego is something to be contained and controlled. In fact, since 2018, May 11th has been designated as World Ego Awareness Day, dedicated to “help people rid themselves of egoism.” We, the authors, would like to explore and question this notion that ego is always bad in leaders.

Leadership literature generally focuses on the negative impact that ego has on a person’s ability to lead, learn, and inspire others. Throughout our careers, both of us have focused on reducing the role of ego in our own leadership, and we have seen friends and colleagues pursue this journey to “rid themselves of egoism.” Let’s start by exploring how an oversized ego can limit a leader.

An oversized ego can blind us to the downsides of our actions and decisions. It can convince us that only we have the answers, which leads us to silence or ignore others. The need to protect an inflated ego can keep us from admitting mistakes, which then keeps us from learning.

Jennifer Woo, CEO and chair of Asian luxury goods giant The Lane Crawford Joyce Group, warns that “an inflated ego prevents us from learning from our mistakes and creates a defensive wall that makes it difficult to appreciate the rich lessons we glean from failure…. Managing our ego’s craving for fortune, fame, and influence is the prime responsibility of any leader.”

David Owen and Jonathan Davidson conducted a study of the behavior of British Prime Ministers and American Presidents over a hundred-year period. They identified “hubris syndrome” among many of these leaders, calling it an acquired disorder brought on by “the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Hubris syndrome, which we might think of as “clinically diagnosed ego,” is the dark side of successful leadership for those who can’t keep their egos in check.

Jim Collins frames the ideal balance between humility and will in his concept of the “Level 5 leader,” which his research has associated with the leadership of many top-performing companies. The Level 5 leader demonstrates a rare combination of personal humility—a well-tamed ego—and deep, fierce resolve. These leaders are as ambitious as any others, but their ambitions are for their companies, not themselves. They set and drive high standards, but manage to do this without drawing attention to themselves. Their careers are marked by the achievements of the teams and companies they lead, not by their own moments in the spotlight.

Collins’s Level 5 definition contrasts humility and will, which suggests that there is an important role for ego to play in the personality of a world-class leader. An “indomitable will” requires conviction, which requires some confident view of the world. It is easy to imagine a person whose ego is so minimized that they lack the confidence to recognize and invest in their own convictions.

Great leaders may need remarkably strong convictions, but every leader needs enough conviction in their beliefs to lead their teams with clarity and purpose. This is especially true in emergencies or times of uncertainty. In these moments, teams turn to their leaders to understand what decisions to make and what actions to take. A leader needs to be able to draw on a reserve of self-confidence in order to rise to the moment.

Leaders need healthy egos in less dramatic times as well. In A Blessing And A Curse: How Can Leaders Manage Their Egos?, author Sally Percy writes, "A healthy ego is a good thing because it boosts our self-confidence, pushing us to confront or overcome our fears. People want to follow leaders who have a healthy ego."

A leader with a healthy ego can fashion the kind of charismatic presence that inspires teams, gives them confidence in the strategy and direction, and creates an environment of trust and creativity. As the Level 5 leadership type shows, the most successful leaders manage to enhance these effects with personal humility. In the modern world of remote-first or hybrid workforces, striking this balance of confidence and humility becomes especially complex when leading people over video calls.

A Gartner poll revealed that 82% of company leaders plan to allow remote work to some extent, highlighting the need for leaders to adapt their ego management strategies in virtual settings. This shift requires a sophisticated understanding of how ego is perceived differently online; while a leader's physical presence might directly convey their ego, virtual platforms can alternately conceal or amplify personal traits, including ego. The challenge for leaders is to balance being effectively assertive without being domineering, as the directness and visibility on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams can intensify ego's impact, complicating the task of assessing team engagement and reactions. Leaders must be judicious in their ego expression, ensuring it bolsters rather than blocks open dialogue and collaboration. Adapting to these new modes of communication is crucial, as leaders must know when to enhance their confidence to motivate and when to moderate it to encourage inclusivity and creativity among their teams. This balance is key to maintaining a healthy ego that suits both the demands of leadership and the specific challenges of remote work dynamics.

The concept of "ego depletion" is also relevant in the context of remote work, where employees' psychological resources can become drained after periods of intense self-regulation. A study conducted by researchers in China explored the increased ego depletion experienced by individuals working from home, illustrating the psychological toll of remote work environments. On the managerial side, some analysts suggest that a push to return-to-office settings may stem from managers experiencing "ego deflation," feeling less influential when their teams are not physically present. While the full impact of remote work on both individual contributors and managers remains partially uncharted, it is crucial for managers to be especially cognizant of how their ego is perceived and how to manage this in remote settings.

Knowing when and how to “dial up” or “dial down” your ego is an essential leadership skill that we often associate with emotional intelligence (also known as “emotional quotient,” or EQ). The “when” requires situational awareness, pattern recognition, and empathy. The “how” requires self-awareness and a toolkit of techniques.

Some situations and team dynamics call for a demonstration of humility by the leader. Examples include:

1. When you’re trying to elicit ideas from the team, especially when the team thinks that some of their ideas might clash with your approach

2. If you ultimately need to make and own an important decision, but first want to pressure-test it with your team

3. When you’re trying to connect with an audience of more junior colleagues

4. If you’re joining a team of peers and sense that some of them may have pre-judged you based on their own assumptions

There is a wealth of literature for leaders on taming the ego, so we won’t go into that in detail. For some starting points, we suggest:

• Harvard Business Review’s Six Principles for Developing Humility as a Leader

• This interview with Susan Cain, author of Quiet, about the value of bittersweet leadership

• Humility: A Humble, Anarchistic Inquiry by Ari Weinzweig

• Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership mentioned above

• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, which explores how to identify and work with people who persistently put their egos over the team’s interests

Some situations call for leaning on, or turning up, your ego. These include:

1. When your team has been dealt a setback or is navigating an unpredictable situation, and turns to you for clarity

2. When your team is bogged down by a growing queue of unmade decisions and needs a push

3. When your team is in a crisis and quick, critical decision making is needed

4. When you need to inspire a large group of people

5. When you need to imagine yourself in a larger role in order to gain perspective on your situation

In these situations, it can help to imagine an “ego hat” that you put on in order to perform certain parts of your leadership role. This involves deliberately switching modes in order to bring your self-confidence and resolve to the forefront of your personality. You allow yourself to feel the accomplishments of your career and the authority of your role. You decide that the moment requires a certain version of yourself.

You might prepare for an upcoming meeting, public talk, or other performance moment by prompting yourself, “Is it time to put on my ego hat?”

Just remember to take it off later!

This notion of calling forth your ego in order to boost your self-confidence and project authority can be especially important for leaders from marginalized or underrepresented groups. These leaders are often fulfilling their role in the face of cultural headwinds, diminished institutional support, and bias.

As Jenny Garrett OBE, author of Equality vs Equity: Tackling Issues of Race in the Workplace, writes, “If you belong to a marginalized group, your humility is more likely to be mistaken for inadequacy and insecurity and, as a result, go against you, especially in cultures where ego is prevalent.” These leaders, Garrett says, sometimes need to "dial up their ego."

This can be a fraught practice for women leaders, who face conflicting expectations in today’s business culture. The authors of the HBR article How Women Manage the Gendered Norms of Leadership list four pairs of demands on women leaders:

1. Be demanding yet caring

2. Be authoritative yet participative

3. Advocate for themselves, yet serve others

4. Maintain distance, yet be approachable

For women leaders navigating these paradoxes, it seems critical to cultivate a healthy sense of “yes, I am the right person for this job.” You’ve probably heard the statistic that men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them. This comes from an internal report by Hewlett Packard that was quoted in Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.

Ego plays a complicated role in leadership, and since each of us has an ego, we need to understand its place. Once you’ve read and absorbed the vast literature on the dangers of an overinflated ego and the virtues of humility, you can more effectively reason about those times when a leadership moment calls for putting on your ego hat.

We invite you to reflect on your own approach to the variety of roles you perform as a leader, and the role that your ego plays in each moment. We’d love to hear about your own experiences with ego management, whether turning it up or down.