Article
How to Improve Your Team’s Decision Making
February 11, 2021
A Disciplined Approach to Better Efficiency, Judgment and Results
Letting the Facts Win
The most powerful method for improving the quality of your decisions is to follow a disciplined decision-making process. Decisions are often contaminated by biases, a tendency to jump to conclusions, emotional reactivity and by pressure to act quickly. In this blog we will review both the benefits of following a disciplined decision process as well as how to implement this this process to improve the quality of the outcomes. When making decisions with a team, the conscious or unconscious influence of the leader can sabotage the entire discussion. The principles and practical suggestions in this article will be useful for both individual and group/team decision making, and for both professional and personal decisions that you need to make. The goal is to make objective decisions and let the facts win. Accomplishing this is a challenge for every leader.
The surprising key to effective decision making
Just as with individuals, there are principles and dynamics that can promote wise and effective team decisions. You might be surprised to learn that an even more crucial factor than gathering reliable data is having in place a disciplined process for involving the whole team in the making of important decisions.
Amazing and Relevant Research
Research by behavioral economists Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony looked at 1,048 business decisions over five years tracked both the way the decisions were made, and the outcomes in terms of revenue, profits, and market share. Their focus was to understand the impact of bias on corporate strategy and the decisions that guided it. Most of the teams they studied had conducted rigorous analyses before making the decision, compiling financial models and assessing how investors might react to their plan. These were not decisions about what color chairs to buy for the conference room, but major decisions such as whether to launch a new product or service, change the structure of the company, enter a new country, or acquire another firm. They also looked at the results, the outcomes of these decision on revenue, profit, market share and return on investment.
Lovallo and Sibony also asked the teams to describe their decision-making process: how they went about making the decision. For example:
- Did the decision-makers consider multiple points of view
- Did they recognize what they didn’t know and what was uncertain
- Did they include participation from a range of people with differing views on the desired outcome and how to get there?
- Did they search for evidence that contradicted their beliefs?
- Did they include in their discussion points of view that contradicted the senior executive’s perspective?
- Did they elicit participation from a range of people who had different views?
What they found was that the decision-making process that the teams utilized was far more important than analysis and having the right data – astonishingly, by a factor of six! Having the right data clearly matters, but it’s not enough. In other words, good analysis in the hands of smart people won’t always lead to good decisions. Even though detailed analysis is important, the decision-making process itself was six times more crucial to successful outcomes. When the decision-making process was improved there was a statistically significant improvement in financial results.
Why should this be? They concluded, "An unbiased decision-making process will do a lot is ferret out poor analysis. The reverse is not true; superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing…”. So, how can the leader ensure that a fair hearing is given to all the facts, relevant factors, and alternatives? How can we attain that level of objectivity and fairness required to minimize biases, challenge assumptions, and as much as possible neutralize all the other ways we tend to blind ourselves, distort our perspective and sabotage?
One way to overcome bias and a tendency to jump to conclusions, is to explore multiple options to avoid focusing on conclusions that are too narrow, biased or reactive. A single individual may have trouble doing this effectively. Utilizing outside input from experts or using your team in a brainstorming session can usually generate numerous possible approaches. This can also help you avoid recency bias. Recency bias occurs when a leader or team puts too much emphasis on recent events and give less weight to those that have happened in the past. It skews perception toward short-term thinking.
Another way to sidestep bias is to invite team members to challenge each other’s assumptions and ask disconfirming questions, such as:
- What could go wrong if we do this?
- What is the biggest potential obstacle you can see in the solution we have proposed?
- If you follow my proposed approach, what might happen that we haven’t thought about?
- What haven’t we considered, what are we missing by taking this approach?
- If we follow this plan, what problems might arise?
How many leaders – especially if they have an idea of where they want to go on a specific initiative – are willing to ask themselves such questions and subject themselves to input that might cast doubt on their decisions? Yet questions like these, if taken up by the group, can yield insights that might avoid hidden danger and difficulty. Leaders often deceive themselves by thinking that they are gathering information when they are actually fishing for support their idea and trying to be right rather than trying to uncover the facts.
If you want to get to the best answer rather than seeking confirmation of your viewpoint, invite the perspectives of people who have diverse backgrounds and experience in different domains and different companies. Don’t be afraid to spark constructive disagreement. In fact, encourage it. Ultimately you will create a more effective decision-making environment if you use your team, and this is particularly important around strategic decisions.
The value of active participation in a disciplined group process
Not all decisions require involvement of your team. Some decisions you may need to make by yourself. Some require you to consult with others who have a useful perspective and unique insight into the problem you are trying to solve. Some are best delegated to others who have demonstrated good judgment and capability. However, when you have the time, need alignment, buy-in and support for your decision, need to generate multiple creative alternatives, and functional or domain knowledge, involving your team may produce a better decision. Of course, this requires good team communication, effective collaboration and means you must actively facilitate a disciplined process. But the synergy of effective team problem-solving and lively discussion can bring exciting results and higher levels of acceptance of the ultimate decision. If you are going to lead the problem-solving or team decision process, here is a brief description of an effective decision process:
Step by Step To Better Decisions
- Clearly identify what the problem is that you’re trying to solve and what you are trying to accomplish
- Define what success looks like and your criteria for evaluating the optimal outcome
- Collect the facts that are relevant to the problem or decision
- Actively encourage the participation of all team members
- Separate the facts from opinions and speculation about the facts
- Generate multiple alternatives for solving the problem
- Evaluate alternatives against your success criteria
- Consider the pros and cons, obstacles and potential consequences of the best alternatives
- Select the best option or multiple options
- Develop a plan of action and how it will be implemented (who does what, when etc.)
- Communicate your decision to those who will be affected
This process doesn’t just happen. The leader needs to be sure a systematic, disciplined process is followed. The leader can help the facts win, or he/she can bias it, skewing the outcome. If you follow a well-defined, systematic and disciplined process, and the team gets used to following that process, the quality of decisions that are made by the team will be much higher. You may not always feel that you have the time to do this, but if the decision has important consequences, or is complex or has triggered strong conflicting points of view, it might be the best approach.
Hagberg Consulting Group/Accenture Research on Cultures that Get Financial Results
The many benefits of including your team in decision-making were borne out by data collected by both Hagberg Consulting Group and Accenture. In a study that looked at the corporate culture of over 300 companies, we found that financial results and retention of top performers were strongly influenced by team participation. Here are some of the key findings:
- The higher the level of team member participation in decision making, the more ideas were generated, and innovation and risk taking increased
- A higher level of participation by team members leads to greater alignment and a sense of ownership on strategic decisions
- A higher level of participation by team members means that they have an opportunity to openly share their views, reducing the chances of political maneuvering behind the scenes
- The higher the level of participation by team members, the greater the spirit of collaboration, communication, and coordination that is created on the team
- The higher the level of participation by team members, the more adaptable the organization
- The higher the level collaboration between team members, departments, and groups, the better the financial results
- The more team members were willing or able to challenge outdated assumptions and ineffective practices, the better the results
- The higher the level of cooperation and team spirit, the easier it was to retain top talent
- The more the organization’s leaders demonstrated trust in team members, the more likely the organization was to retain top talent
- The more conflicts were addressed directly and not swept under the rug, the more likely it was to retain top talent
When team members have active input in decision making, they take pride in the decision, and feel more engaged with the company. When they are directly involved in the creation of strategy, for example, they have a deeper understanding of what the strategy is, and are more aligned, inspired, and motivated to work toward achieving whatever the plan is. Employee loyalty increases. When the players are more aligned, the team and the organization as a whole becomes more agile, able to adapt more quickly and move more coherently. Not surprisingly, financial results improve.
Team participation in making important and critical decisions stimulates useful dialogue. The input from team members with different domain knowledge can lead to exploration of creative alternatives. This will take more time than a decision handed down from above but will likely yield higher quality solutions and produce greater buy-in and support for the ultimate decision.
This collaborative problem solving/decision making process requires the leader to facilitate effective communication and skillfully guide the team to systematically work through the problem. But the leader must also be willing to share power and give up some degree of control.
The dynamics of group decision making
- Brainstorming: The decision-making process moves naturally through predicable phases. It begins with some version of brainstorming, in which ideas are generated and put on the table (or the whiteboard, or a digital equivalent) for consideration. In this stage, the goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible, not to censor some ideas as “unworkable” but rather, to encourage the ideas to flow. It is a process of divergent thinking, aiming at an expansion of possible options.
- Getting closure: Brainstorming alternative solutions inevitably leads to the need to bring all the ideas to closure. Your task as leader is to help the team hold an in-depth discussion of the alternatives, and to provide some structure for selecting the best of them. The purpose of the discussion, of course, is to reach some sort of consensus, to narrow down the options in order to go forward toward a solution and then a plan of action.
- Exploring differences : In the conversation, those who favor an approach or a solution have a chance to advocate for it. The job of the others is to listen respectfully and consider the idea with as little bias or prejudgment as possible. Typically, many ideas are put forward, without a clear solution emerging.
- Getting bogged down : At this point, the team may struggle to comprehend the wide range of ideas that have been generated and reach consensus or at least a workable conclusion. This can be difficult and often leads to arguments and stalemate. The team may become bogged down in competing viewpoints. No way forward seems clear and obvious. Frustration mounts. There may be irritation or anger.
Why does the team get stuck?
- Group members have different agendas, needs, biases and frames of reference.
- Often the discussion reveals that people don’t really understand one another.
- Some members push their own agenda aggressively.
- Some interrupt while others go on and on repeating their point of view.
- Some dismiss the ideas of other members.
- Some members attack, while others get defensive and withdraw.
- Some lose patience with the whole process, which can lead to frustration, and dysfunctional conflict or the adoption of suboptimal solutions that are a compromise, false consensus, or groupthink.
- If the trust level of the team is low and there are conflicts and tensions between team members, it is common for members to misinterpret or misrepresent each other’s ideas.
Overcome the conflicts or stalemate :
In order to break through the logjam, the team leader may need to switch styles and help the team engage in convergent thinking, in order to move together toward a decision. Convergent thinking is applying logic to evaluate options and narrow down to the best answer or alternatives. The leader needs to help the group develop a common understanding, generate alternative solutions, sustain motivation to work through the issues. and then integrating divergent into a mutually acceptable solution. The process of working toward a solution can be greatly aided by a leader or outside facilitator who is skilled in facilitating group discussions. This is an art that requires both learning and practice. As the leader, you may choose to find and hire such a person as a consultant when difficult or crucial strategic decisions need to be made. Or you may take it upon yourself to play that role. If you do, keep in mind the following basic guidelines:
- Don’t panic: Recognize that you or your team is stuck, and that it is a necessary stage in the transition from divergence (throwing out a multitude of ideas) to convergence (choosing the most viable solutions and formulating a plan).
- Encourage full participation: Get everyone involved in the dialogue. Foster an atmosphere of safety and respect. Draw people out. Ask team members to speak in order to be understood rather than to win an argument.
- Promote mutual understanding: This begins with listening. Encourage people to try to walk in each other’s shoes, to really understand what others are saying rather than looking for weaknesses or holes in their argument. Ask people to define their terms and explain their thinking and their conclusions.
- Work toward an inclusive solution: Avoid “my way or the highway” thinking and look for ways to incorporate everyone’s interests in a workable plan.
With those basic principles in mind, consider doing some of the following:
- Confirmation and Sunflower Bias: Be aware that these biases are real problems in creating an atmosphere of open discussion of alternatives and reaching conclusions about what to do. As the team leader, be careful not to unduly influence the group or manipulate them into supporting your biases. Relinquish the desire to control the solutions and instead, allow all ideas to get a fair hearing, so that the facts can win. It’s often wise to speak last.
- Psychological Safety: Throughout the discussion, remember the importance of creating an environment of psychological safety for open dialogue to really be effective. People need to feel comfortable and safe enough to freely express their views. Be alert to the fact that not all team members may be putting their cards on the table. Despite your effort to encourage psychological safety, not everyone feels safe in expressing what they really think, want or fear. They may feel it is too risky, so they hold back. Try to draw out team members’ concerns in open discussion but also consider having each member anonymously write down anything they haven’t said on a slip of paper.
- Encouraging Participation: Try to listen to all points of view by drawing out team members, summarizing or paraphrasing their points. Each team member has a unique set of interests and concerns and needs to have the time and to feel safe to express them. Watch out for team members withdrawing or shutting down
- Digging Deeper: Do your best to help team members develop a deeper understanding of each other’s perspectives. Encourage them to ask questions to clarify their understanding when other members’ ideas are confusing or complex. Remind team members that their goal in this phase is to understand one another, not to win arguments or points.
- Actively facilitate communication: This means you may need to play communication traffic cop or referee to make sure members are listening and really understanding other’s points of view. Sometimes this means providing some structure for the discussion such as setting a time limit for each team member to express their point of view, and/or encouraging other team members to ask the speaker to clarify what they mean or to give further explanation of key points. Then, ask any members who have asked questions if they now understand the speaker’s point. Look for patterns or ways to categorize the options or ideas that are generated that can help bring coherence to the discussion
- Clarify differences: When there is a misunderstanding – and there will be – try to clarify differences and see if there is a common ground. At this point your goal is to promote accurate understanding, not to resolve conflicts between members.
- Surface different assumptions, motivations and definitions: Be alert to team members having different assumptions about the problem, the meaning of various terms, the risks, the importance of different issues, and so on. Members may assume, rightly or wrongly, that other members have hidden or unexpressed motives for proposing a solution. Part of your job is to help members explain the real meaning of statements they make to one another so unspoken assumptions are really understood.
- Call out disruptive or non-collaborative behavior: When team members interrupt or are overly aggressive, dismissive or confrontational, the leader must firmly call out these behaviors.
- Separate facts from opinions: It is important in discussing the details of a problem or solution to separate the facts from people’s opinions, interpretations or speculations about the meaning of the facts. Before trying to explore the viability of different solutions, it is wise to list facts and opinions separately to help the team distinguish one from the other.
- Don’t allow false consensus: Once the team has begun to narrow down their options, ask each member to express their concerns about each proposal. In an effort to try and get the decision made, it is easy for the leader to assume agreement with a solution. This may result in hidden concerns masquerading for consensus. False consensus often sabotages real alignment and creates fertile ground for later problems in implementation. Resistance often has its roots in fears about how the implementation of a proposal may impact the individual team members or their teams. This is related to group think.
- Apparent tangents or wild ideas can be gold mines: Be alert to the fact that some members’ ideas or proposals may initially feel like they were off topic or represent a distracting tangent, when they actually might represent a subtle or new issue that others have not seen. If you explore these topics the team might develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding or better solution.
- Revisit original goal or decision criteria: Once you have narrowed down possible alternatives to a reasonable number, consider going back to your original problem definition and goal, and evaluating each alternative against your decision criteria. Ask the team to consider what are the most important elements of an ideal solution. It might be cost, ease or speed of implementation, fit with your strategic objectives, consistency with your core values or any other thing the team considers crucial for the proposal to be successful.
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But the deeper truth goes underground. Listen for the Conversation Beneath the Conversation In every important conversation, there are usually two conversations happening. The first is the official conversation: the product launch, the missed deadline, the strategic decision. The second is the human conversation underneath it: Can I trust you? Is it safe to disagree? Do you actually want the truth? Disconnected leaders hear only the official conversation. Connected leaders listen for both. This does not mean they become therapists. It means they understand that people are not reasoning machines with job titles. They are status-sensitive, threat-sensitive, belonging-sensitive creatures trying to get work done while protecting themselves. If you ignore that layer, you misunderstand the meeting. The leader who misses the second conversation will often solve the wrong problem with great confidence. That is a specialty of very smart people. Make Contact Before You Make Your Point If you want people to tell you the truth, remember this rule: Make contact before you make your point. Before you explain, correct, defend, decide, or solve, show the person that you understand something about their experience. Not agree. Understand. You can say, "I can see why that would bother you," or "You are worried this decision will create confusion." Those statements do not require surrender. They require attention. Analytical leaders often resist this because they think understanding someone's emotion means endorsing their conclusion. It does not. You can understand someone and still disagree. You can validate the concern and still make a hard decision. But if you skip understanding, your eventual decision will feel imposed, even if it is correct. Connection first. Influence second. Reverse the order, and you may win the argument while losing access to the person. Stop Solving Too Soon Some leaders use problem-solving as a socially acceptable way to avoid contact. Someone says, "I'm overwhelmed." The leader says, "Let's reprioritize." That may be useful. But if you move there too quickly, the person may experience it as, "Please make your feelings operationally convenient." Solving too soon tells people, "Your emotional experience is a problem I want to make disappear." Listening first tells them, "Your experience matters to me." Before solving, ask one better question: "What are you worried I am not understanding?" Or the most important leadership question: "What am I missing?" That one shift creates space for truth. Contempt Kills Candor If there is one behavior that destroys connection fastest, it is contempt. Contempt says, "I am above you." It may be loud, but more often it is subtle: an eye roll, a sigh, a smirk, or a clipped tone. Contempt is especially dangerous in smart leaders because it can hide inside intelligence. The leader experiences himself as clear or efficient. The other person experiences being reduced. Once people feel contempt, they become careful, performative, and compliant instead of candid. If you want the truth, you have to become someone people can disagree with without feeling diminished. Repair Is How Trust Gets Rebuilt You will miss people. You will interrupt. You will get impatient. You will defend yourself. You will explain too soon. You will turn away when you should have turned toward. Welcome to the species. The goal is not perfection. The goal is repair. Repair is the moment when you notice a rupture and come back. "I came in too hard. Let me try that again." "I answered too quickly and missed what you were really saying." "I got defensive. Keep going." These sentences are not weakness. They are maintenance. People do not need you to be flawless. They need to know you can notice your impact and come back. 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Founder who stops learning does not usually look stupid. They look confident. Busy. Decisive. Certain. And increasingly wrong. That is what makes the problem so dangerous. I coach founders, studying personality, and watching them either scale or stal. I have become convinced that learning agility is one of the most important predictors of whether a founder can grow with the company they created. Not IQ. Not raw drive. Not technical skill. Not even prior success. Those things matter. But they are not enough. Because the reflexes that win at 10 people often stop working at 100. The decision-making speed that saved the company early can become recklessness at scale. The founder’s vision that once pulled everyone forward can become rigidity when the market changes. The control that created quality in the beginning can become the bottleneck that prevents the organization from growing up. The founder who succeeded through instinct now needs to succeed through systems. The founder who succeeded through force now needs to succeed through people. The founder who succeeded by being at the center now needs to build an organization that can function without everything going through them. That is where many founders get into trouble. They do not fail because they are unintelligent. They fail because they keep applying yesterday’s playbook with today’s authority. And when the results deteriorate, they rationalize. The market is confused. The team is weak. The investors are impatient. The customer does not get it. Maybe. But sometimes the real problem is simpler and more uncomfortable: The founder stopped learning. What Learning Agility Really Means Learning agility is not just being open-minded in theory. Plenty of leaders describe themselves as open-minded right up until someone disagrees with them. Learning agility is the capacity to absorb experience, update your assumptions quickly, and change your behavior without losing your center or your conviction. It means reality can still teach you. That sounds simple. It is not. Founders are often rewarded early for conviction, speed, intensity, and control. Those are useful traits when a company is fragile and every decision feels existential. But over time, the company changes. The job changes. The market changes. The team changes. The founder has to change too. Learning agility has several parts: Mental agility. The ability to think through complex problems and resist the gravitational pull of the first plausible answer. People agility. The ability to understand different kinds of people, read dynamics in real time, and adapt your approach. Change agility. A positive orientation toward novelty, uncertainty, and disruption rather than a defensive one. Results agility. The ability to deliver outcomes in first-time conditions where the old formulas do not apply. Self-awareness. The ability to perceive accurately how you are actually doing, not how you hope you are doing. That last one matters most. Because you cannot learn from experience if you cannot tell the truth about your own impact. Busyness Is Not Learning One of the great founder traps is confusing busyness with learning. You can be in a thousand new situations and learn nothing from any of them. You can raise money, hire executives, launch products, fight fires, open markets, lose customers, change strategy, and still not extract the lesson. That is not learning. That is motion with a calendar invite. Learning requires reflection. Not endless self-analysis. Not navel-gazing. Not journaling until everyone around you loses hope. Just disciplined reflection. After important events, decisions, conflicts, or surprises, ask yourself: What was I trying to accomplish? What actually happened? What is the gap? What does the gap suggest about my model of how things work? What will I do differently next time? Done weekly for a year, that practice alone can change a leader. Experience does not automatically make you wiser. Reflected experience does. How the Ego Turns Experience Into Repetition Here is where the problem gets deeper. The ego blocks learning agility at every stage, and it does so in ways most founders do not see coming. Start with the obvious. If you are identified with being right, feedback becomes a threat instead of data. You defend instead of inquire. You cherry-pick evidence that supports your existing view and discount what does not. The moment someone challenges your approach, your instinct is not curiosity. It is protection. But there is a deeper layer. Learning agility requires you to update your mental models quickly. That means letting go of the identity you built around the old model. Early success creates a story. “I am the visionary who sees what others miss.” “I am the decisive founder who trusts my gut.” “I am the one who knows what great looks like.” “I am the person who moves faster than everyone else.” That story may have been useful. It may even have been true. Until it wasn’t. When the market shifts and your gut starts failing, you now have a psychological problem, not just a business problem. Updating your strategy may feel like updating your identity. So you double down. You blame the team. You blame the market. You blame timing. You blame execution. Anything is easier than admitting that the operating system that got you here is now becoming a liability. The Insulation Problem As founders gain authority, they often lose access to reality. Employees defer more. They challenge less. They soften the truth. They try to read what the founder wants to hear. They nod. And once everyone is nodding, the founder may already be in trouble. This is what I call the insulation problem. The founder receives a curated version of what is actually happening, filtered through people who fear the founder’s reaction or want the founder’s approval. Meanwhile, the ego is getting reinforced constantly. You are the founder. You raised the money. You set the vision. You are in charge. The cruel irony is that self-awareness can regress during the exact period when the company most needs the founder to grow. The company is scaling. The role is changing. The stakes are higher. But the feedback loop is weaker. That is a dangerous combination. The Founder Derailers I See Most Often The specific derailers are painfully predictable. Founders who cannot tolerate ambiguity rush to certainty and then grip it. Founders who anchor on past success treat it as a blueprint for the future. Founders who are so action-oriented that they never reflect keep applying the same playbook and wondering why results are deteriorating. Founders who are loners by nature solve problems alone instead of drawing on the collective intelligence of the team. Founders who are overconfident genuinely believe they have less to learn than everyone else. Founders who treat disagreement as disloyalty train the organization to stop telling the truth. All of these are ego in motion. Each one protects an identity at the expense of learning. And each one makes the founder less adaptive right when the company most needs adaptation. What Agile Leaders Do Differently The best leaders remain connected to reality. That is not glamorous, but it is everything. They build practices that keep them humble about their own limits and curious about what is actually happening. They reflect consistently. Not quarterly at some beautifully facilitated offsite. Weekly. After real decisions. After real mistakes. After real surprises. They surround themselves with people who will challenge them. Not professional contrarians. Not cynics. Not people who enjoy being difficult. People whose judgment they trust and who feel safe enough to disagree. They stay close to the ground. The higher you rise, the more filtered the information becomes. Great leaders stay connected to customers, frontline reality, and the unpolished version of what is happening. They study outside their domain. A finance executive who studies design. A CEO who studies anthropology. A founder who reads about ecology, military strategy, or psychology. Cross-domain learning interrupts the default thinking of your primary field. And most importantly, they develop the capacity to observe their own mind. That is where meditation becomes practical. Not meditation as spa music for stressed executives. Meditation as observation. You sit quietly and watch the mind defend itself. You notice the urge to be right. You notice the fear of irrelevance. You notice the attachment to the old model. You notice the impatience that wants to skip the lesson and get back to action. That awareness creates space. And space is where adaptability lives. The Founder’s Real Test The old playbook does not announce that it has expired. It simply starts producing worse results. That is why founders have to keep learning before the evidence becomes humiliating. The founder who keeps learning can scale with the company. The founder who stops learning slowly becomes the constraint. Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they lack courage. Not because they lack work ethic. But because they are still running yesterday’s operating system in a company that now requires something more. Learning agility is not a nice-to-have leadership trait. It is the founder’s survival skill. The company will keep changing. The market will keep changing. The team will keep changing. The real question is whether the founder can change without feeling personally diminished by the need to change. That is the mark of a leader who can scale. Not the leader who is always right. The leader who can be corrected by reality and still stay strong. That is learning agility. And for founders, it may be the difference between building a company that grows and becoming the reason it stops.
After almost 50 years of coaching leaders, it’s time for me to be very honest about what I’ve seen. The ego has destroyed more leaders than incompetence ever did. That may sound harsh, but I have watched it happen too many times. Smart people. Talented people. Visionary founders. Hard-driving executives. People with charisma, intelligence, courage, ambition, and often a real desire to build something meaningful. Then success arrives. And success is where the ego really gets dangerous. When leaders are struggling, reality still has a vote. Customers complain. Investors push. Employees leave. The market humbles them. But once leaders gain power, money, status, and a circle of people who need something from them, reality gets quieter. People start editing the truth. They laugh at jokes that are not funny. They soften bad news. They call emotional reactivity “passion.” hey call micromanagement “high standards.” hey call arrogance “confidence.” They call avoidance “strategic patience.” And before long, the leader is no longer leading a company. They are leading a carefully managed psychological ecosystem designed to protect their self-image. That is when things get expensive. Ego Is Not Just Arrogance Most people think ego means arrogance. That is too simple. Ego is the mental picture you carry of who you are. Your role. Your competence. Your status. Your worth. Your story about what makes you special. It is not useless. Early in life, ego helps organize identity. It helps us function, strive, compete, and build. But here is the problem. The ego starts as a tool and quietly becomes the boss. At first, you use it to orient yourself. Later, you defend it like your life depends on it. If you are identified with being the smartest person in the room, disagreement feels like an attack. If you are identified with being the founder, criticism of the company feels like criticism of you. If you are identified with being decisive, uncertainty feels humiliating. If you are identified with control, delegation feels like loss. If you need admiration, honest feedback feels unbearable. And if you are identified with being a great leader, congratulations. You have just made it harder to become one. The Ego Is Always Looking for a Deal The hidden bargain beneath ego-driven leadership usually sounds like this: Uf I succeed enough, I will finally feel secure. If I am admired enough, I will finally feel worthy. If I control enough, I will finally feel safe. If I win enough, I will finally be beyond doubt. The problem is that the bargain never fully pays off. Achievement does not end the hunger. Often it intensifies it. The leader gets the title, the funding, the exit, the recognition, the keynote invitation, the glowing article, the larger house, the more impressive friends. And somehow the inner machinery keeps running. More proof. More control. More admiration. More winning. More reassurance. This is why some extremely successful leaders remain strangely restless, defensive, brittle, and dissatisfied. They have achieved enough to impress the world, but not enough to quiet the self they are trying to protect. That is not a moral failure. It is a psychological trap. And leadership gives that trap a very large stage. How Ego Distorts Leadership Here is the brutal part. The ego does not just make leaders annoying. It distorts judgment. When the ego feels threatened, the leader stops seeing clearly. They stop listening when challenged. They become rigid instead of adaptive. They surround themselves with people who agree with them. They take credit and avoid blame. They micromanage because they cannot trust others. They confuse being questioned with being disrespected. They interpret disagreement as disloyalty. They protect the image instead of examining the truth. The more power they have, the worse it gets. Not because power makes everyone corrupt, but because power reduces corrective feedback. People defer more. They challenge less. They wait to see what the leader wants to hear. The leader slowly loses contact with reality. This is the great danger of executive success. The external world starts confirming the internal illusion. The Founder Version Is Especially Dangerous Founders are particularly vulnerable because the company often begins as an extension of their identity. That is not all bad. In the early stages, a founder’s obsession can be essential. The company may need the founder’s force, conviction, stamina, and refusal to accept conventional limits. But what gets a company born can also keep it from growing up. When the founder is fused with the company, every problem becomes personal. A product critique feels like an insult. A senior hire’s independence feels like a threat. A board challenge feels like betrayal. Delegation feels like irrelevance. Operational discipline feels like bureaucracy. The founder says, “No one cares as much as I do.” That may be true. But sometimes what they really mean is, “No one validates my identity the way this company does.” That is a harder sentence to say out loud at a board meeting. The Great Leadership Question After all these years, I have become less interested in the surface behavior and more interested in the motive underneath it. Not just, “Why do you micromanage?” But: What are you trying to protect? Not just, “Why do you dominate meetings?” But: What happens inside you when someone else has the better idea? Not just, “Why do you avoid conflict?” But: What does disapproval threaten in you? Not just, “Why do you need to win?” But: Who would you be if you did not? That is where the work starts to get real. Most leaders do not change because someone gives them a better technique. They change when they see the hidden bargain they have been making with themselves. Self-Awareness Is Not Self-Absorption Some leaders resist this work because they think inner development is soft, indulgent, or irrelevant to results. That is nonsense. Self-awareness is not sitting around admiring your emotional complexity. It is the discipline of seeing what is actually driving you before it drives the company off the road. A leader who cannot observe their own defensiveness will call it conviction. A leader who cannot observe their fear will call it urgency. A leader who cannot observe their need for admiration will call it culture building. A leader who cannot observe their control needs will call it accountability. Self-awareness is not ornamental. It is operational. It determines whether you can hear bad news, accept feedback, delegate authority, admit mistakes, make clean decisions, and separate the mission from your own self-image. What Actually Helps When ego is running the show, insight alone is not enough. You can understand your patterns intellectually and still be captured by them under pressure. I have seen brilliant leaders explain their own dysfunction with great sophistication and then repeat it 20 minutes later. So the work has to become practical. First, notice the pattern in real time. When you feel defensive, name it silently. I am defending. I am trying to win. I am afraid of looking incompetent. I am trying to control the room. That small act creates space. You are no longer completely fused with the reaction. Second, use feedback as inquiry, not verdict. When someone gives you hard feedback, do not rush to decide whether it is accurate. Ask: What part of me feels threatened by this? What self-image am I defending? What might I see if I were not protecting myself? That shifts feedback from judgment to information. Third, meditate. Not because you need to become serene, spiritual, or annoyingly calm in a linen shirt. Meditation trains the basic leadership muscle most leaders lack: the ability to observe the mind without immediately obeying it. You notice the tightening in your chest when someone questions you. You notice the urge to defend before the other person has finished the sentence. You notice the story your mind creates to protect your image. In that noticing, there is freedom. Fourth, practice non-doing. This is radical for founders and high achievers. Sit for 10 minutes. Do not optimize. Do not plan. Do not solve. Do not check your phone. Do not turn stillness into a productivity hack. Just sit there and watch how uncomfortable it is to not be becoming something. That discomfort is data. It shows you how addicted the ego is to motion, improvement, fixing, proving, and control. The Real Shift The goal is not to kill the ego. Good luck with that. Also, you need a functioning self to lead. The goal is to stop being unconsciously governed by it. You can still be ambitious. You can still be decisive. You can still be competitive. You can still build something enormous. But your ambition does not have to be compulsive. Your confidence does not have to be fragile. Your leadership does not have to be a 24-hour defense system for your identity. That is when ego becomes something you can use rather than something that uses you. And that is when leadership matures. The deepest leadership question is not: How do I become more powerful? It is: What is my power serving? Because if your power is serving your ego, the company will eventually pay the bill. And so will you.
