Ego Free Leadership

by Brandon Black

  In preparation for our first program, LaL conducted a 360-degree feedback for each of us. A few weeks later, Shayne, now my executive coach, scheduled a debrief call to go through my results. The issues didn’t surprise me: I debated people, didn’t solicit information from others before making decisions, and always needed to be right. Common traits of a strong leader, I thought. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “The benefits outweigh the detriments. I debate with people to find out how attached they are to their ideas. The truly committed people continue the discussion, which gets us to the right outcome. If the final answer is what I suggested in the first place, it’s only a coincidence.”

  “There are a lot of comments here about how people are afraid to speak up,” he pointed out.

  “This isn’t a democracy!” He was starting to bug me now. This wasn’t an issue that needed to be solved. “Don’t you agree it’s the CEO’s job to make the big decisions?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Why do you think so many people gave the same feedback if it wasn’t important to them?” he asked. “Is it possible these behaviors get in the way of your team reaching its full potential? Take your debating, for example. Is it possible that it is more about you being right than what’s best for Encore?”

  As far as I was concerned, CEOs needed to be confident. Having a strong ego was integral to being a successful executive. I decided not to debate this with Shayne.

  “Maybe,” I muttered, and then changed the topic to whether my team was taking their feedback seriously.

  SHAYNE

  “It’s not that I want to be right,” Brandon corrected me as I tried to deliver his 360-degree feedback in October 2005. “It’s that I am right most of the time. That’s what I get paid for.”

  “Uh-huh.” It was the fourth point in a row he rebutted. “Even if you are right,” I persisted, “people feel like you ‘plow over them.’ They feel intimidated and belittled. What do you think is driving this?”

  “Control,” Brandon answered without missing a beat. “It’s my way of keeping discussions on track. Very common for CEOs.”

  This is going to be trouble, I thought.

  Brandon’s 360-degree feedback detailed his strengths and weaknesses as a leader. He was viewed as intelligent, highly competent, and outgoing, and his team generally enjoyed working for him. Like every leader, however, he had several harmful behaviors that negatively impacted his colleagues and the company culture. Although he was eager for his team to “look in the mirror” and professed that he wanted to do so as well, he nevertheless had a justification for each piece of constructive criticism. For the few weaknesses he did acknowledge, he dismissed their impact. Brandon wanted to learn and grow, but his involuntary responses in our calls were reactive and unproductive. He believed what he was saying and didn’t think he was being defensive.

  Unknowingly, his conscious intentions were being derailed by automatic reactions that prevented him from responding productively. We all do this. When faced with uncomfortable feedback, for example, each of us can shut down, discredit the source, or blame others—even though we know we should learn from the criticism. These reactive behaviors are a symptom of our ego, or egosystem.

  Let’s think of ego as a constant preoccupation with our self-worth. While it can feel incomprehensible, it is actually a predictable system of triggers and reactions that can be mapped out. This is our “ego-system.” Each one of us has beliefs and fears about our value, and they cause defensive and/or self-promotional behaviors when under stress. Whether in a meeting, a presentation, or a relationship, part of our attention—sometimes all of it—is preoccupied by our view of our self. Are we competent? Respected? Intelligent? Liked? Attractive? Included? Each of us has a set of criteria we unconsciously judge ourselves against. When we measure up, we feel pride, even superiority. When we don’t, we feel uncomfortable, stressed, often afraid.

  These feelings of inadequacy or imperfection automatically trigger knee-jerk reactions, usually in the form of fight–flight behaviors. Although they often feel “right” in the moment, these reactions have wide-ranging negative consequences.

  Brandon didn’t suspect his behavior—debating, judging, being sarcastic—was undermining his goals at Encore. But who would want to suggest an out-of-the-box idea if he or she would have to defend it against the smartest and most powerful guy in the room? Or to admit a weakness if it might be used later in a sarcastic put-down? Sure, there are a couple of bold-faced leaders out there who might do this, but it’s rare for a team to have even one such person.

  THE EGOSYSTEM

  Our preoccupation with self-worth triggers reactive behaviors with the following characteristics:

  When triggered, our ego drives us to:

  •Automatic—They happen without our conscious awareness.

  •Avoid conflict

  •Blame others

  •Be a perfectionist

  •Deceptively destructive—Our ego hijacks our talents and strengths to protect our worth at the expense of others and our best intentions.

  •Get angry or defensive

  •Omit or hide issues

  •Shut down

  •Be indecisive

  •Jump to conclusions

  •Very predictable—Each one of us has three or four primary ways in which we perceive a threat to our value and react to protect it.

  •Judge ourselves and others

  •Procrastinate

  •Not ask for help

  •Debate/prove others wrong

  Most of our egosystem’s reactions have similarly negative ripple effects on our goals and relationships. If we micromanage others, they often don’t feel trusted. If we get defensive or angry, they feel attacked. If we shut down or avoid conflict, they might feel judged, abandoned, and/or unsure of where they stand. Brandon’s first blind spot lay in underestimating how his own dysfunctions derailed him and his team from achieving their goals.

  When people become aware of their “derailers,” they typically justify these behaviors as an inflexible part of their personality. “I’m just that way”; “Take the good with the bad”; “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But these behaviors are not genetic. They are learned, and even though we developed them over decades, it is never too late to unlearn them. Acknowledging these dysfunctions, and tracing them back to their roots (yes, analyzing our childhood), allows us to discover our unique form of preoccupation with self-worth.

  At this point you might be thinking, “Wait, I want leaders with strong egos running my organization! They take charge and drive results.” Sorry, but this book aims to debunk the “ego is good” myth.

  Although leaders focused on their own success appear to make high-performing individual contributors, their ego is actually causing them to play it safe in their own specific way. Brandon’s debating and sarcasm helped him dominate discussions. This put his direct reports too much on the defensive to ever really challenge his thinking, ensuring that Brandon never felt wrong or not smart enough. Task-driven leaders can produce vast amounts of work, but in their comfort zone, somehow never finding time for what’s creative or strategic. Visionary thinkers lose interest when reality doesn’t appear as brilliant as their original idea. None of this is a coincidence. As we’ll explore, our ego can’t stand failure, incompetence, or weakness, so it avoids what is truly challenging to us.

  More disruptive, a “strong ego” mentality ultimately prioritizes individual success over the team and mission. Modeled across an organization, it generates waves of distrust and infighting, inconspicuously absorbing the majority of your workforce’s energy. The unproductive mindset and behaviors revealed in this book cost you dearly in both quality of work–life balance and bottom line results.

  Dissolving these tendencies—individually and as a team— will unleash the natural talents, boldness, and creativity of you and your people.

  What Hijacks Our Behavior

  BRANDON

  Ten o
f us from Encore showed up in Sausalito at one of the most spectacular settings I can imagine for a vacation, let alone a leadership seminar. We were in a banquet room of the Spinnaker restaurant, situated on the waterfront across from San Francisco. We were mesmerized by the fog rolling over the hills and the sailboats cruising the bay.

  Seventy people from different industries and sizes and types of businesses (for-profit, nonprofit, and government) were in attendance. I looked around the room to gauge the experience of the other participants. Would they provide any valuable advice to my team? I was still frustrated by the lack of insight from LaL’s 360-degree feedback. It was time for Shayne and his team to bring their “A” game. My mindset from the beginning was “I’m the client here.” I had taken the risk to hire them and needed to see immediate dividends.

  Unfortunately, no insights were forthcoming. Their process was time-consuming and monotonous. We spent hours filling out charts and responding to questions about our fears and reactions. By the third day, my team and I had resorted to joking about the other participants and venting about how trapped and miserable we were.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me, Brandon,” my CIO said to me one morning as we sat on the deck during a break. “You drag us up here to become better leaders and instead we spend our time analyzing what happened thirty years ago? The only reason I’m still here is you’re my boss and you can fire me if I pack up and go home.”

  I normally would have reacted harshly to his tone, but I agreed with every word. If we hadn’t paid LaL a lot of money, I would have taken the next flight back to San Diego.

  My frustration was exacerbated by superficial team conversations. I had hoped LaL would help us get the more problematic performance and leadership issues out on the table, but no one was engaging.

  Finally, on the last day, we started a discussion about Encore’s challenges and began brainstorming solutions. It didn’t take long, however, for the excuses to start: not enough time for all the priorities, the lack of transparency from me and Paul, executives feeling like I played favorites, and so on. I was so tired of hearing them. Toward the end of the discussion, Sharon, the SVP of Human Resources, made a suggestion I thought was off base, and I countered with a flippant response. To my amazement, she became visibly upset.

  “I was just kidding,” I told her. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  I wanted to push forward with the discussion but couldn’t figure out how to do so without appearing to be even more insensitive.

  “That hurt, Brandon,” she finally said, looking right at me.

  I met her gaze, and felt my stomach turn. She was the third person in the past month to tell me my comments could be hurtful. The therapist Dana and I were seeing had suggested to me that my sarcasm was veiled anger and that “nobody is ever 100 percent kidding.” I assured her I was the exception to the rule. I grew up in a household where most communication came in the form of sarcasm; we debated anything for the sake of argument, and the person with the last word won. But we were all “just kidding.”

  I had tremendous respect for Sharon, and it shocked me that I’d treated her that way. Other interactions from the seminar came to mind, and I began to see that my sarcastic and disparaging tone might be more destabilizing than I thought. I wondered how many people I had hurt or relationships I had harmed because of my quick tongue.

  I wasn’t the only one on the team guilty of this behavior, so then and there we made an agreement not to use sarcasm in the workplace. It was a hopeful end to a lousy “learning how to lead” week.

  SHAYNE

  Encore Capital’s first seminar was a wild ride. While we racked our brains to find a way to help them put their issues on the table, they sat in the back of the room and made fun of us and the other participants. They disappeared mid-session to shop in Sausalito’s boutiques and made it clear our work was a waste of time. Conveniently, the issues they had with each other stayed carefully under wraps. We were the problem.

  One exchange I witnessed that week highlighted what happened when they attempted to talk about their challenges. They were discussing the skyrocketing cost pressures in their industry.

  “You guys shouldn’t be so gloomy,” exclaimed Dave. “We collected over five million dollars last month!”

  “But our models planned for six,” responded Paul, the CFO, clearly wanting to move on. “Now—”

  “But our team collected 30 percent more than last year,” Dave insisted. “Who does that?!”

  “We bought all that debt for twice as much as last year, so at a 30 percent increase, we’re underwater,” Brandon explained.

  “It’s still a great accomplishment.”

  “I suppose you want to give them an extra bonus?” Paul asked.

  “Yes, they need encouragement,” Dave said. “They’re working really hard.”

  “Well, when we go bankrupt and start a cheerleading company, I’ll put you in charge,” Brandon laughed. “But for now, why don’t you let us figure this part out?”

  Dave opened his mouth, then closed it. The message was clear: Dave’s input wasn’t helpful or wanted, and Paul and Brandon thought him stupid.

  “Hold on,” I said, “can we talk about what just happened?”

  “No,” Brandon was emphatic. “It’s handled, thanks.”

  Sarcasm carries overtones of judgment because it often masks, through mockery, conflict avoidance. Both Paul and Brandon had concluded that Dave lacked analytical skills and didn’t respect his experience. They weren’t addressing this with him, however, so their frustration grew. He sensed their judgment, and felt threatened by it, but was too uncomfortable to say so. Similar dynamics were at play with other team members, and these unspoken—yet loudly expressed—criticisms were toxic to team trust. And when trust is low, our fear of others’ judgments intensifies. We quickly assume any weakness or shortcoming we disclose will be held against us.

  Meanwhile, our egosystem is constantly monitoring our value and status. People can say, “I don’t care what others think,” but that is almost universally untrue. Our brains are wired to care, and trying not to is another form of ego-protection. This fear of others’ judgment creates an emotional tension or mind chatter in each of us, and we expend significant time and energy trying to manage it. At LaL, we call this monitoring “desired and dreaded images.” Desired images describe how we wish to appear or what we want others to think of us. Dreaded images are how we do not want to appear or how we fear being judged.

  Think of desired and dreaded images as adjectives, respectively charged with the allure of acceptance and approval or the threat of rejection and disdain. Each of us has semiconsciously decided which images are most crucial to prove (desired) or defend against (dreaded) in order to preserve our sense of value. The culture we grow up in influences the primary images we take on.

  To understand why desired and dreaded images are problematic, it’s critical to distinguish between being a characteristic and appearing to be it. Every member of Encore’s executive team was skilled, intelligent, and hardworking. Several of them also had desired images of appearing smart, competent, and under control. Disclosing to Brandon that they were struggling carried the risk of appearing incompetent, ineffective, and not smart enough to get the job done. Feeling weak or inferior bruises our egosystem’s sense of self-worth, and we’ll do almost anything to avoid that discomfort. Since Brandon was quick to judge, his executives’ egosystems wouldn’t let them take the risk of disclosure.

  COMMON DESIRED AND DREADED IMAGE DUOS

  •Competent (smart/stupid, capable/incapable, experienced/ignorant)

  •Likeable (kind/mean, reasonable/unreasonable, humble/arrogant)

  •Ethical (generous/selfish, honest/dishonest, a good/bad person)

  •Strong (self-sufficient/needy, powerful/powerless, in control/helpless)

  All of this helps explain why an intelligent and highly successful leader would commit his management team to a weeklong leadership develop
ment activity—only to actively undermine it and allow his team to do the same. There was too much fear about what would happen if people said what they really thought. For Encore, it was too uncomfortable to even talk about talking about it.

  Leaders in every organization fall into this form of dysfunction. Our rational mind knows that we should talk about our difficulties, ask a question if we don’t understand, or deliver that difficult message. But more primal emotions of fear and vulnerability prevail. Not acknowledging our difficulties, however, cuts us off from help or mentoring, increasing the likelihood that we’ll underperform. Trying to appear competent actually causes us to learn and grow more slowly and, over time, become less competent. The longer Encore’s executive team protected their desired and dreaded images, the more their problems accumulated and the more certain Brandon became that they weren’t going to cut it.

  Another consequence of clinging to our desired images is that others don’t suspect that we have them, which leaves us to feel alone with our vulnerabilities. Almost no one on Encore’s management team realized that their teammates felt as isolated as they did. They also didn’t suspect that Brandon was equally afraid of being judged. Brandon didn’t even realize it yet. Everyone simply covered up when they felt hurt, or bit back with a sarcastic rejoinder.

  This cycle continues until someone shares how they feel. On the final day of the seminar, I had just come over to check in when Brandon made his sarcastic comment to Sharon. Despite her tough exterior, she admitted she’d been hurt, and that moment of courage created several breakthroughs.

  First, it brought vulnerable emotion into the meeting, which allowed others on the team to express similar feelings. In this case, it happened to be a woman who opened up first, but several men on the team felt even more insecure with Brandon. Second, it confronted Brandon with the real costs of his behavior. He didn’t know why he did it, but he realized he didn’t like its effect.