Want to Drive Sustained Change? Leave Your Ego at the Door

The inescapable truth is leadership effectiveness contributes directly to sustainable change. At senior levels, effective leadership must be less about me and more about others.

In our work, we are often asked to compare Leader A with Leader B. What we find most revealing is not what they do—for instance, asking in an interview, “What was the result of the situation?” or “Tell me about a time when you’ve been able to X.”—but how they do it. Probing the how provides greater insight into how skilled a leader is at managing their ego, and, importantly, it shines a light on how well they can scale their leadership and drive sustainable change through others.

The phrase “Leave your ego at the door if you want to be a good leader” was shared with me about 30 years ago. As is often the case with wisdom shared at an early part of your career, it only truly makes sense over time and with experience.

Leaving your ego at the door means thinking and caring less about yourself and your needs and more about others. About 15 years ago, this philosophy was captured in popular business psychology by the notion of followership. Provocatively, various articles asked, “Why should people follow you?” This really underscored the principle that it’s less about you and more about other people and that to scale your leadership, you need to place greater focus on how you make people think and feel and how you drive their behavior.

With regard to leadership development, ancient philosophy offers an interesting insight into how leaders develop. In Greek, there are two ways to describe the lens of perception: dianoia and epinoia. Dianoia refers to didactic learning, learning by rote to acquire knowledge. In contrast, epinoia is the ability to learn and perceive with depth and to process in-the-moment experiences in order to deepen self-awareness and separate and manage ego needs.

I see this difference most prominently at the very highest levels of senior leadership. Well-equipped leaders are much more effective at reading the room—they have the capacity to think beyond self and understand group dynamics, and they have a wider perspective for sense making and judgment.

Any neuroscientist will tell you that operating with wider sense-making curiosity and being patient with judgment yield greater creativity and open-mindedness. And that’s the key: A leader who leads with more attention on the needs of others than on the needs of self is much less prone to jumping to quick, perhaps lazy, conclusions about the dynamics in the room and will engage others to land on the right answers. Truly engaging others is one of the core aspects of scaling your leadership.

Developing and sustaining a well-managed ego is hard work. Throughout history, philosophers have grappled with and offered suggestions to this age-old human challenge. Advice includes borrowing the mask of others or even putting on the mind of others. Effective self-management is the ability to put distance between your ego and your intention. The trick is to start with the intention: What impact do I need to create? How do I want people to think and feel? What do I want them to do? Starting there and focusing more on the needs of others and less on self-interest places distance between one’s consciousness and the grasping ego (who always wants to be front and center).

Leaders who master the skill of managing ego and leaving it at the door know not only the techniques to create distance but also how to react when under pressure. The biggest challenge to scaled leadership comes when there is a perceived or real threat. Threat typically activates the ego. The ego reacts with bluster or avoidance, which creates massive impediments to leadership impact.

Senior leaders are often very complicated. They have a series of drivers that propel them forward: to seek opportunity, to make progress, to be successful in their careers. This pursuit of self-proficiency and self-progress must be balanced with a recognition of the people you need around you to deliver. A leader who focuses purely on self ends up looking very political and self-interested, and this is in direct contrast to a leader who genuinely wants to get the best thinking out of the group. The latter is a leader who recognizes their thinking has gaps or biases and knows how to leverage others to compensate and create more.

“Leave your ego at the door,” a colleague said to me once. It was puzzling 30 years ago, but now it makes so much more sense. The orientation becomes: What’s my role in this room right now? Where do I add value? What do the people in the room need from me? How do I want them to think and feel, and what do I want them to do? From there, execution makes much more sense and ensures pure alignment with the needs and the outcomes I desire from others.

–David Langdon