Tiny Spark: The surprising reasons why you shouldn’t leave egos at the boardroom door

Trust is at the core of aligned and healthy leadership but how easy is this to cultivate and maintain when ego enters the boardroom??

Our Sparks by Ignium podcast host Phil Rose spoke to leadership coach, speaker and founder of the Mindful Choice Leadership Academy, Christie Garcia about the protective nature of ego and why we need to understand it better.

What is ego?

‘It’s the unconscious brain’ Christie explains.?

It displays itself in habits, behaviours and beliefs that can affect how we coach, mentor and manage others, communicate, respond to stress and delegate.?

Often we are unaware of what we’re doing even if others are feeling the impact.

How do we make more mindful decisions?

Three steps to making friends with your ego

The first step is self-awareness. Getting to know your best self and not-so-best self may take some self-reflection. Beyond this, getting an honest perspective on how your behaviours and words affect other people may involve inviting external feedback or using an in-depth profile tool.

The response you get may prickle the ego to get defensive or shuting you down. Just because we’ve heard feedback, doesn’t mean we’re going to change so the next step is acceptance and ownership. You learn the visceral feelings of your behaviours and the beliefs and mindset behind them. Pausing allows time to notice the gap between your impact and your intentions. You become more present and less judgemental of yourself and others.

This leads us to the third step where we can take action from a place of empathy – for ourselves and others.?

So instead of the bad reputation ego has picked up along the way, it serves as a protective power, a driving force into the future and a powerful marker for change.

4 ways you can build your team through leveraging ego

• Get hardcore external feedback on your habits, behaviours and communication. It may sting but will give you the chance to change by choice.
• Hear it and own it.
• Be 1% better every day. The ego wants to create ambitious goals, to be all or nothing but that’s not sustainable. Work in increments.
• Learn to dance in the chaos. The ego wants to avoid chaos but life is messy. Enjoy the process of learning and then move on.

So should we keep ego out of the board room? For a stronger, better-aligned team that will be the driving force behind impactful growth, the answer is probably not. We could be missing out on powerful signals, points of connection and the glue of our humanity.

Intrigued? Check out the full discussion in the Ignium Spark Tank here.