The Ego Lift

Some leaders believe the biggest threat to success comes from the outside: competitors, market shifts, resource constraints. I think the greatest danger to a team is usually internal: an unchecked ego at the top. Ego convinces leaders that they alone have the answers, blinds them to new information, and makes them resistant to change. It turns what should be a shared mission into a personal crusade and suffocates the creativity and collaboration a team needs to adapt.

The ego lift shows up when a leader believes their title grants them absolute knowledge, or when an athlete refuses coaching because they’re sure they know best. Those moments look like confidence, but they’re insecurity dressed up as bravado, and they poison teams faster than almost anything else.

Listening doesn’t work when ego is standing in the way. A leader might nod along waiting for their turn to speak, or worse, interrupt to redirect the conversation back to themselves. Either way the effect is the same: people stop sharing, meetings become performative, feedback withers, silos grow, and the whole organization slows down.

This is the dark mirror of what I described at the end of the last chapter. I mean the leaders who claim they alone have the vision and force alignment through dictation instead of inspiration. They believe respect comes from authority rather than credibility. These explicit-authority leaders declare a path without inviting any discussion, and they mistake fear for alignment. Under that kind of command, teams comply on the outside while disengaging on the inside, working to avoid conflict rather than to achieve anything great.

It’s the leadership equivalent of “because I said so.” Seniority doesn’t always mean smarter. Experience brings real insight and intuition, but it is not infallible, and a fresh perspective can break a stale pattern. The surgical teams who learned patient handovers from Formula 1 pit crews saved lives because the mission mattered more than their egos.

Leadership also never stops changing, so it demands continuous learning. In What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith describes how the traits that once fueled a leader’s success can turn into blind spots if the leader fails to grow. Markets change, requirements shift, and what worked in a previous era cannot simply be applied wholesale to new problems. Those past lessons are still critical for growth, they just need to be treated as guides rather than rigid blueprints.

The founder’s dilemma captures this perfectly. Founders are often great at the vision, the hustle, and the risk-taking it takes to start a company. As the organization grows, though, the same command-and-control habits or unstructured creativity that fueled the early wins can become obstacles. The company starts to need process, delegation, and collaborative leadership. When founders cling to the old ways, convinced their instincts alone will scale the business, they risk undermining the very mission they set out to achieve. The founders who make it through recognize the shift and evolve. They seek out mentors, build diverse teams, and accept that their role has to change if the company is going to thrive past the startup stage.

When everyone agrees the mission is the most important thing, these decisions get easier. Reaching out for help or inviting a different viewpoint is the obvious choice when it serves the mission. People who won’t listen or won’t try are usually acting from fear. More often than not it’s a personal agenda driving them, not the team’s success. Product management has no place for ladder-climbers or title-chasers. The mission must come first, and when it is your guiding light, every other decision becomes clearer.

When a team truly cares about the mission, ego fades. In a satisfying paradox, personal success tends to follow anyway, as a symptom of the mission’s success.

The hardest lift you will ever make is putting your ego down.

The strongest teams are led by people who do not let their ego, their vanity, or their fear get in the way.