Ego - the downfall of 2020

When needing to be right is more important than getting it right…

There’s a level of self-belief that is required to rise to leadership positions, but it’s a fine line between self-belief and ego, and if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that ego is toxic.

We cannot blame it all on the individual leaders though. We have created these monsters. Admiration for ‘decisive action’ and derision of those deemed ‘dithery’, our insistence on receiving immediate answers to all our questions, and seeing instant action.  We’ve turned our leaders into ego driven monsters – we demand it of them.

And so, unphased by words like ‘unprecedented’ and phrases like ‘never before seen’ these ego monsters the world over calmly reassured us that things would be okay, simultaneously underestimating the virus and overestimating themselves.

The dangers of the role that ego plays in crises are well known; commanders that refuse to retreat in the face of certain defeat, pilots who fail to acknowledge that they have lost control of the aircraft, CEOs who have bet on the wrong strategy but can’t admit it, all have led to well-known tragedies. Though despite these being picked over in political histories and business case studies, we still seem to value this kind of leadership, worship it even.

No points for guessing who the poster boy for this kind of leadership is; happy to make on-the-fly medical recommendations midway through a press conference, or make blanket statements that fly in the face of all expert opinion, Donald’s ego knows no bounds. There is nothing I have to say that hasn’t already been said about the scale and variety of his leadership failures; suffice it to say, the hubris of the middle aged white man has not been this dangerous since World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq… never mind.

Then there’s Boris, the decisive action man that was meant to demonstrate British strength in the face of Brexit. The UK’s response to the pandemic, may on the surface appear to be the actions of an indecisive leader, not one driven by ego. To me, it’s a different manifestation of the same issue. Refusing to admit any weakness, Boris has ploughed on with a succession of conflicting policies, inconsistently applied and poorly understood, that have led the UK deeper into crisis. No wonder the British public aren’t willing to follow along.

 Ego is not confined to the realm of politics politics, far from it. In the corporate world more insidious types are emerging, those desperate to ‘know better’ than the experts and mainstream media, forming opinions based on fringe media and selective data. I’ve seen more than a few 'controversial' opinion pieces by these leaders. They seem to see it as their opportunity, if not duty, to provide ‘thought leadership.’ In reality, I think their limited time would be better spent understanding the impact of the crisis on people in their business, rather than playing at armchair data analytics to prove they have a ‘point of view’.

It’s a lot to expect for leaders to have made all the right calls in the early days of the pandemic, even the scientists were learning about the virus in real time. What is reasonable is for these leaders to actively learn from their mistakes, and to do so explicitly, and publicly. They require humility to demonstrate that they are more concerned with getting us to the right place, rather than needing to be the person who got us there.

But it’s also up to all of us to create space for our leaders to learn. We cannot accuse them of ‘flip flopping’, when they course correct, of ‘dithering’ when they want to consult experts. We have to celebrate the outcomes, not worship the heroes. There can be no room for ego in times like these.