Leadership Ego -The Road To Disaster

The world is moving on recognizing admirable organizational cultures and strong correlations to business sustainability, employee engagement and performance. This corporate culture buzz is pushing leaders to wholeheartedly embrace Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness. DEI has become a must have value amongst many organizations and is celebrated in unprecedented ways, not realizing the fact that the top leadership is totally accountable to bring such a culture alive. We often see organizations portraying a culture, just for the sake of employer branding initiatives and subsequently encountering a widening image vs reality gap.

Diversity has been always a board level calling to add strength to the employer branding perspective showcasing how diverse the leadership teams and other levels in the organizations are and presenting an ALL FOR ONE culture in the corporate branding program. Whilst we all see diversity adding color to the organization and helps in instigating creative teams, engagements and outstanding performance this initiative needs to be practiced as a prayer.

In the hands of an egotistical leader DEI initiatives struggle to reach its objectives and studies indicate the characteristics of this type of leadership could bring in detrimental impact to organizational reputation. Their modus operandi is My Way or No Way!

Egotistic leadership tends to block the different dimensions of the possibilities of nurturing a great organization as the self-proclaimed status induces their behaviors in discrimination, unfairness, and inconsiderate moves.

They are unaware that all leaders have to exit from their respective organizations one day and forget the fact that their leadership style leaves a footprint leaving an impression from being the worst to great.

Here are some of characteristics of the egotistic leadership in organizations?

• Leaders with ego demonstrate a high degree of transactional leadership and make a firm submission that their priority is to win and succeed always.
• They make it mandatory to regard themselves as irreplaceable and portray superiority over everyone else
• They do not consider succession planning as in important process for sustainability
• They don’t believe in centered leadership and make themselves the epicenter of all operations and become control freaks
• They don’t have time for reflection and unaware of their own blind spots
• They are surrounded by YES – Sir audience
• They want to always win arguments all the time
• They choose to rush and crash instead of adopting speed as they don’t believe in consensus and collaboration
• They exclude important stakeholders in crucial decision-making processes
• They micromanage big time and believe in perfection and managing things on their own
• They love appreciation even for the mediocre actions
• They hate people who challenge the status quo or want to change the present practices
• They love to raise their voice at important meetings and believe in subduing others
• They lack control over their own emotions and often blow their fuse
• They are judgemental and have preconceived perceptions
• They lack self-awareness and are not great listeners
• Their self-interest, class and brand matters more than the organization
• They lose key talent and have high attrition and blame it as a global crisis of brain drain
• They are not emotionally intelligent and recommend others to attend such workshops
• They feel they can run the organization alone without the support of others
• They solicit personal loyalty and expect others to compromise professionalism

How could managers and employees who can easily spot this leadership style correct such behaviors and help organizations raise the benchmark and inculcate the best cultures to perform.

• Show selfless leadership to your teams and others and make them visible to the leaders with ego.
• Refuse to compromise your professionalism towards personal loyalty
• Live your purpose and passion and promote the ideology of diversity and inclusion
• Show respect to your team members and stakeholders and make this a priority at all times
• Demonstrate that you are a good listener and obtain quality feedback and help everyone grow
• Provide unconditional support without discrimination and be humble
• Appreciate when it comes to celebrating little achievements
• Build a culture where EGO is seeing as an enemy of fostering effective leadership

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