Posts tagged ego
The Dark Side
Jul 29th
Thank you for dropping by! Thursdays are Servant Hearts day. Gracious leaders around the world guest post to NorthFork’s blog, A Servant’s Heart, sharing their fabulous insights regarding the serving nature of leadership. We’re delighted you’ve joined us. Be prepared for a variety of experience!
Today, we are happy to welcome Sharon Eden. Sharon is the “Inner Leadership and Coaching for Purpose” expert. Her bio highlights her role as an exceptional coach with a ‘fire in her gut’ deeply committed to helping executives and senior managers discover their purpose, passion, and power to be happier, more effective, and influential at work with substantially improved performances as leaders and managers. What her bio doesn’t say is this: Sharon is inspiration. There is a simple elegance about her and her work that brings you back for more. She is a lady of grace with a zest for life unparallelled. And she is a wonderful friend who reminds us in a brilliantly refreshing way life can be an adventure …
Dark Side of Servant Leadership
by Sharon Eden (London UK)
You’ve read the definitions. You’ve read the theories. You’ve read the seminal books on serving leadership. So… you know what it is.
Do you? Do you really?
It seems to me that the literature demands that servant leaders be absolutely fully actualised humans. And, as I say to my psychotherapy clients when they ask how long it will take to be cured, “Have you got 3,000 years?”
Here’s a sample of servant leadership characteristics taken from the literature…
Charismatic vision and behaviour that inspires others to follow, capacity to motivate others to commit to the vision, encouraging innovation and creativity, coaching to the specific needs of followers.
Mmm… I think Hitler and Mussolini had all those!
Clear sense of purpose, building vision and goals, value driven with congruent behaviour, strong role model, high expectations, persistent, identify themselves as change agents, enthusiastic, strategic, risk-taking, unwilling to believe in failure….
Mmm… I guess you know the comment I’m about to make here too.
But, what differentiates the servant leader is self-knowing, emotional maturity and the ability to deal with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Oh, those old things… complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Piece of cake!
AND true servant leadership flows from the inner spiritual awareness, or presence, which servant leaders acquire in their journeys through this world.
Phew! No wonder they’re few and far between on the ground.
There’s a piece of Zen wisdom that says if you can define a thing, then that’s not it! And that’s the problem when ‘science’ and the intellect get hold of servant leadership. For they literally suck the heart and soul out of it and the nature of its being in action… Servant leadership is not its definitions!
Without heart, soul and action from integrity, your ego can get its rocks off with servant leadership. It can use it to inflate its own grandiosity… ‘How wonderful I am doing good works’… its own sense of absolute rightness and, as if still in the feudal system of kings, its own divine right to rule.
And, for sure, we have modern examples of leaders who purport to serve, from the kitchen sink to heads of nations, for whom ego, egoistic wants and desires are foremost. ‘I only want what’s best for you’ or ‘I deserve fame and lots of money for taking care of my people’… while the family or the nation is ruled by fear and obligation and eventually enters decline.
For me, being seduced by your ego is the most important aspect of the dark side. The aspect which you and I, if we aspire to servant leadership, must hunt out with the vigilance of a starving tiger seeking food.
Because such a travesty of servant leadership is a violent abuse to which any of us, being human, could fall prey.
There’s a part of my personality which I call Genghis Khan. Once upon a time I could castrate a man at 20 paces with the violence of my tongue. That was spawned by my fury and my pain which came from my experience of being a misused female in a male dominated world.
Having worked to expand myself, I no longer choose to hold to the experience or act out the fury and pain. But, hey, given the right circumstances, I know I potentially still could. Any time I’m very tired, feeling down, physically ill or depressed, my personality gremlins can come out and bite me on the butt!
And, if you don’t think that happens to you or you could behave in a similar way to my Genghis Khan, then you most definitely need to wake up to the dark side of yourself. Because, if you don’t acknowledge or work reparatively with it, I guarantee it will most definitely and unconsciously leak out of you and create a huge whack around the head for others and, potentially, yourself.
For how can you and I serve honourably and well without awareness of our dark side and being able to manage and choose our thoughts, feelings and behaviours?… How can you and I serve honourably and well without developing our own inner leadership so as to better lead for ourselves… as well as others!
Servant leadership and its dark side? A work in progress for us all!
What makes the hottentot hot?
Jul 1st
Thank you for dropping by! Thursdays are Servant Hearts day. Gracious leaders around the world guest post to NorthFork’s blog, A Servant’s Heart, sharing their fabulous insights regarding the serving nature of leadership. We’re delighted you’ve joined us. Be prepared for a variety of experience!
Today, we are happy to welcome Steve Broe back with a generous second heaping helpin’ of leadership lovin’. It’s my sense the basis of authentic leadership — servant leadership — is love, integrity, trust, and hope. But, as Steve shall soon articulate in his post, there’s more. Courage is essential for the servant leader. A beloved Frank Baum character knew this all too well.
Those who have seen Frank Baum’s televised version of The Wizard of Oz recall these famous lines of the Cowardly Lion.
Drawing us into the serving nature of leadership, Steve’s post reminds us a battle, not unlike the Lion’s, rages as we endeavor to thwart ego’s hold over us that we may more readily place others at the center of our service … and our leadership. Moreover, Steve helps us discover there is no need for a ‘Triple Cross’ to imbue us with “Courage” because, in large part, good courage is never far away; we can always find it where we find our servant heart.
“Ain’t it the truth? Ain’t it the truth!?”
The Courageous Leader Challenges the Ego
by Dr Steve Broe (Scottsdale, Arizona)
Courage. Observers find this quality in great leaders, yet we know that leaders with courage are not strangers to fear. A person can make a brave choice, and know powerful fear at the same time. We remember the leader for courage, yet fear may have been present.
Somehow, a courageous act propels one beyond the immobilization felt when fear grips the heart. Leaders know this dilemma, and take the bold act. We celebrate leaders when the courageous step makes a difference, hastening a better world.
Even understanding the world around us can be an act of courage. I think sometimes our ego acts to hide us from information that doesn’t support our vision of ourselves. It’s natural, our image protection system (that’s the ego) finds ways to shield us from negative news. The world can be hard, and the effective person must learn to deal with truth. The ego is not a good mirror of the world; it will show us the world as we want it to be.
A courageous person challenges the ego, applies critical thinking, and looks at the world as it is. “Tomorrow’s greatest leaders are those with the courage to face reality and help the people around them face reality,” said Harvard professor Ronald Heifetz. Courage may involve challenging conventional thinking and helping others to do the same.
How is it possible to challenge the ego? Don’t we hold a single view of the world? Actually, no. Our views of the world are mutable; when we shift perspective, our mind reassures us that we are consistent. The ego makes sure that no matter what we do or think, we are always “right.” The mind is not the same as the ego, and one can challenge the ego’s position. The ego is a constructed view of the world. The mind is a “prior,” it came first. The ego adds interpretation and judgment to life experiences. The interpretation of the ego works like a filter on understanding and decisions.
Ego will tell us, “Don’t hurt yourself. You don’t need to be a hero. The courageous thing is to protect one’s interests.” The mind has the power to look at a situation, compare what is going on to personal values, and make a decision — without the help of the ego.
When I perceive a situation around me, I pay attention to what I can know. I might have measurements of force, and estimations of morale. My ego is the first to rush in with interpretations of what is going on. As the perceiving leader, I decide to question my own assessment, and ask myself, “What else could be going on?”
For example, suppose that I see many large boxes of dog food left in front of my neighbor’s house. The factual evidence is a reckoning that someone has brought dog food in large boxes. The interpretation might be, “my neighbor has a dog.” In many cases, the interpretation will be good. Nevertheless, I don’t know about a dog just by looking at the delivery.
Even though the ego tells us, “My neighbor is keeping a dog,” the delivery could mean several other things — such as the neighbor won the dog food in a contest, the delivery was made to the wrong address, or someone is playing a joke.
The courageous person is willing to consider the facts. The ego may demand attention and insist on its counsel being followed. Sometimes we may follow the ego because it is the easiest thing to do — after all, not everyone will see their ego as separate from their mind. The ego is so seductive a voice — a voice that is quite aware of our personal needs, what gets us going! — that it is a compelling guide to our action. The ego is not always wrong, however it knows how to get our attention.
The effective leader chooses wisely, given all available information. If the leader has confused his center with the ego, it may require an act of courage to ignore it. One tactic of the ego is to send feelings of fear when its counsel is ignored. Fear is a powerful deterrent, one the ego understands how to deploy.
There are three effective strategies to respond to the ego’s tactics. First, one can think critically. Learn to recognize fallacies and emotional responses. Secondly, one can pause and reflect in one’s spiritual center. The more regularly that one returns here, the less influence the ego will have over the mind. Third, one can cultivate spiritual health. Yoga, T’ai Chi, and prayer may serve you well here, and they are not the only practices that nourish the spirit.
The leader requires courage to move beyond the limitation of the ego. Becoming a positive change agent for the world has always been a spiritual journey. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” said French author Anais Nin. Courage is one of the virtues necessary to grow in spite of ego’s fear.
Ego v Spirit
May 5th
Some months ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Harry Tucker on Twitter. He is the consummate gentleman, and he was very quick to graciously reach out a hand in friendship. Since that first encounter, we have enjoyed the immense pleasure of chatting from time to time, and he recently invited me to assist him on a very personal humanitarian project. Harry has become more than a Twitter pal; he’s a wonderful friend who exudes, day in and day out, a passion for leadership. Not the glitzy ‘leadership’ we see bantered around the press as virtuous but, rather, the get-your-hands-dirty-following-your-heart kind of leadership. I’m sure you’ve seen it before. If not, just watch Harry to learn, first hand, of the serving nature of leadership. In this post, Harry lifts the veil on leader ‘success’ to give us a glimpse into the heart of a servant leader and reveal the awesome power resident in a world of “We.” Please enjoy this week’s Servant Hearts post — Ego v Spirit.
The Heart of a Servant Leader – Ego vs Spirit
by Harry Tucker (New York City)
Being a servant leader is one of the most challenging and rewarding endeavors that one can embrace.
For some, the concept of leadership invites thoughts of power; the notion that “I have earned this dominion over others so that I may direct them as I feel they need to be directed.” Others believe that with their talents and life experiences, the awarding of the title, “leader,” is an entitlement; some type of reward they are owed based on what they have accomplished. The true servant leader sees leadership as the opportunity to serve others, to influence the team and surrounding environment to produce long-lasting, impactful results and to encourage development of similar leadership traits in others.
With any of these beliefs, leaders often find themselves confronted by something that is both one of the greatest gifts AND one of the single largest enemies of leadership. This combination of gift and enemy within one entity can be confusing and beguiling. We need this gift in small doses in order to move forward with confidence. In these situations, it is a necessary companion on our Life journey. However, when it grows sufficiently, it passes the point of empowering us and instead, destroys us and everything around us.
What is this “thing” that is both an empowering, enlightening gift and a disempowering, destructive foe?
It is our ego.
Our ego, in the correct amount, provides us with the self-confidence that propels us to use our gifts appropriately in the service of others. It enables us with the oomph to keep moving when times are challenging. As ego helps us move forward, the Universe often rewards us by manifesting blessings in many ways. However, many times our ego, which has been our healthy and enabling companion, takes a look at this manifestation and thinks, “Hmmm … I must be pretty good to manifest this. I wonder what else I can manifest if I put my mind to it?”
The ego, having forgotten that the “royal we” produced the abundance together, begins to assert itself as the master of its domain. It takes actions assuming that only it knows the right way to do things; that only it has the knowledge needed and, in the end, it can only count on itself to gets things done. It embraces the belief that “if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.”
What further exacerbates the situation is that ego has, as part of its self-defense mechanism, the belief that everyone else has an ego that is intentionally conspiring to knock it down from its lofty perch. To protect itself, it proactively attempts to weaken the ego of others with thoughts of distrust, hurtful words, action to disable others, and other non-collaborative efforts. This results in leaders and the teams they serve dissolving into a tense, combative, exhausting conflict of wills, and a struggle to establish who is smartest, most able, most capable, or most whatever. However, what the ego most fears is our Spirit, the part of us we can’t see but we know is there.
The Spirit recognizes our gifts and allows us to recognize the gifts of others. It allows us to embrace the belief we are all in this together, and the best way to make a difference and exert impactful influence is by bringing our gifts together.
Just as a leader who leads with ego finds egos responding in kind, the leader who leads with Spirit finds the Spirit of others responding in return.
• The Spirit that says, “I honor the gifts within you as I know you honor the gifts within me.”
• The Spirit that is built upon love, trust, collaboration, learning and sharing.
• The Spirit that is built upon serving others, not ruling them.
If you have too little ego, you become the world’s doormat. If you have too much, you think the world is your doormat. Neither extreme is healthy and the servant leader seeks to find a balance between the two extremes. As a servant leader, have enough ego to propel yourself to action, but let your Spirit be that which takes action.
My many years of consulting on Wall Street have helped me to ascertain, in a matter of minutes, the level of success enjoyed by a leader and their team. How do I know? It’s simple really. In the first five minutes, I can sense whether the Spirit on the other side of the table wants to hug me in welcome or the ego wants to choke me in an effort to control me. Our ego says, “I am perfect.” Our Spirit says. “We are perfect.”
When I am sitting across the table from you, does your Spirit or your ego do the talking? How do you know?
In service and servanthood.
Harry Tucker
