Let's Talk About Ego

If you are a builder and I mean anyone building a movement, a business, an organization, or a dream this one might be for you. A reminder to the readers here: everything I share are reflections on my own leadership journey. Consider it a cautionary leadership tale, if you will, sharing my own learnings so you can move with a little more ease.

I am a builder, and I am good at it. I know how to build movements, teams, organizations. Maybe it's my Cancer energy, maybe it's 25+ years of experience, but I can walk into a team meeting and diagnose where the tension lives, where the team is winning, and what the plan should be. But I was not ready for one of my greatest lessons to come from my husband.

I was in the middle of a program launch. The grant was secured, the team was in place, the launch was forthcoming. For weeks, work had been living in every corner of our house. Dinner conversations trailed off because my phone was face-up on the table. "Just give me twenty more minutes" turned into an hour, more nights than I want to admit. I told myself it was temporary; that once the launch was done, I'd be present again. My husband had heard that promise time and time before. Then one evening, tired of the texts, the calls, the laptop that never closed, he turned to me, lovingly grabbed my hands, looked me in the eyes, and said, "hey you know what, babe, you aren't a superhero. You aren't putting out actual fires. You can close the laptop now.”

His words made me pause hard. After I got over the sting, I went into deep reflection about why it landed the way it did. His words were kind so why did I feel like this? My first instinct was defensive: he doesn't understand my work; my work is important; my team needs me; I want to support them and be a good leader. But after some time, I was left with a truth I didn't want to own.

His words had challenged everything I'd learned about leadership by watching others. In reality, I liked being needed. I liked being the center of the action, the decisions. Ewww, that felt gross to say. It felt like ego. The thing I said I didn't want, I was actually embodying. I had a team. Why wasn't I letting them lead? And that's the thing about ego in leadership: most of us didn't wake up one day and decide we wanted it. It's learned. We watched the leaders who held everything together get praised for it. We watched busy get mistaken for important. Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the lesson without ever agreeing to it.

If your team can't do the work without you, maybe that's on you. Is your ego the glue holding your blinders on?

At some point in almost every coaching relationship, we reach a particular moment. The leader has started to see their patterns, the fires they run toward, the urgency they spread, the culture they've been creating without meaning to. They're doing real work. And then comes the harder question: why? Why do we keep doing this, even when we can see it isn't working? Even when we're exhausted? Even when part of us knows there's a better way?

A lot of it comes down to something we don't talk about much in leadership circles: ego. Not the loud, arrogant kind. The quiet kind. The kind that looks like dedication, competence, and care, but underneath is a deep need to be the one with the answers.

If this lands hard on you, I'm sorry, but I'm not. This is the place to have those hard conversations.

I'm not saying this to be harsh. I'm saying it because I've seen it in leaders I deeply respect, and I've had to look at it in myself. Ego in leadership isn't a character flaw. It's often a survival strategy that got promoted past its usefulness.

Here's what it looks like in practice. The leader who has to weigh in on every decision, even small ones, because she can't quite trust things will go right without her. The executive director who rewrites the draft instead of coaching the person who wrote it, because her version is just better. The founder who has built an entire organization around her ability to read the room, solve the problem, and save the day so many times that we start to believe, quietly, the organization couldn't survive without us doing exactly that.

That last one, the savior pattern, is one of the most common things I see in mission-driven leadership. If this is you, not to worry, it makes sense. These are people who got into this work because they genuinely wanted to help, to fix things, to make a difference. The desire to save something is part of what brought them here. But when that impulse goes unexamined, it shifts quietly from motivation into identity. Being the one who solves things stops being something you do and starts being who you are.

And that's where it gets costly.

When you need to be the one with the answers, you stop asking the questions that would actually grow your team. When you need to be needed, you subtly discourage the independence that would eventually free you. When your identity is wrapped up in being the person who holds everything together, letting someone else hold something feels like a loss even when it's exactly what the organization and your team need.

This is what I mean when I say ego leads to burnout. Not because you're arrogant. Because you've built a leadership practice that requires you to be at the center of everything, and that is an exhausting place to sustain. 

The shift I've watched leaders make the real ones, the lasting ones isn't about becoming less confident or less decisive. It's about getting honest about the difference between "I have the answers" and "I need to be the one with the answers." Those are very different things. One is competence. The other is a pattern worth sitting with.

What would it feel like to walk into a room and not be the person who fixes it? To let a problem sit long enough for someone else to step up? To let it breathe before we step in? To say "I don't know what do you think?" And actually mean it?

For a lot of leaders, those questions surface something real. A little discomfort. Maybe some resistance. That's not a sign something is wrong with you. That's the beginning of awareness.

These days, when my phone doesn't leave my hand or the laptop stays open past dinner, my husband doesn't have to say a word. I catch it myself now. Not perfectly. But more.

Where in your leadership might ego be working against you in ways that look a lot like strength?

The ego piece is some of the most personal work I do with leaders, and often the most freeing. If this series is landing somewhere real for you, I'd love for you to stay in this conversation.

This is Part 3 of The Burn, a four-part series on the patterns that quietly lead leaders to burnout.

New post is on its way. Stay tuned.