EGO – Boon or Bane for Excellence

EGO is an interesting thing, and a lot has been written about the same. Many people have defined it in many ways. Plenty of suggestions / recommendations regarding the same are available. It has been described in books / discourses as old as few thousands of years to the most modern theories of our time. It is mentioned that Ego is kind of perception of self, felt by oneself. It provides you the necessary strength to state/do what you believe in and do not get intimidated by the other egos in the surrounding but if the person’s ego becomes big then it can drive him/her to ground. It is also seen that more and more you achieve success, your ego starts becoming bigger and bigger without you noticing it. Many a times it is seen that people do not like to work for/with a person with bloated ego. It is also seen in the organization that many of the so called debates on what strategies to be adopted, which solution should be selected, how a program to be structured, etc. is actually battle of egos of the stakeholder and typically egos find various avenues to showcase themselves to other egos and establish its supremacy over others. We can continue writing things about ego for pages and pages but it will not end, I want to examine how ego plays out when we talk about Excellence

As we know excellence is a continuous journey wherein we try to climb steps which take us to the higher level of excellence and there is absolutely no difference in personal and professional life. It simply means that we need to identify that we are now comfortable of performing certain activity at specific level of performance and then trigger our mental process to see what would be the next step on the ladder of excellence. It is extremely critical that we identify this state as early as possible and prevent getting in to the resistance barrier that is created by the Zone of Comfort. So how do we identify this stage at the earlier? Well, our ego comes in handy for this. When we feel that we are doing a specific activity comfortably and successfully, we start getting recognition from the external world in some form or other for the same. This recognition starts building up our ego and our ego starts growing. We need to observe ourselves, as soon as we consider ourselves as “experts” or “go to guys” for a specific type of activity, it is time to look beyond. It is time to look at the next step.

Ego can also be used to provoke us to take the next step. It is our ego, which typically helps us with an urge to do something better by looking at other egos surrounding it. Some one has said that you need to be with some one to become like that some one. There is a connotation that when you will be with this some one, you will observe that some one and imbibe the best practice observed in to you. I feel that in reality, it is our ego which continuously wants to become bigger and is always in search of ways and means to become bigger. So a bigger ego is identified in the form of someone like whom you want to become and our ego starts getting associated with it and see how it can become bigger through doing certain activities, acquiring some more skills, positions, etc.  So one needs to identify and examine this urge to become like some one at the earliest but keep a watch as to whether the ego is asking us to learn new things or prevent others from learning new things so that our ego remains intact. We need to ensure that our ego is pointing towards learning and positive things.

Ego can actually be very useful to push ourselves while we are climbing the excellence ladder. It being a perception of self, it actually can act like a positive spiral in our journey of excellence.  

The same ego can also create significant problems in the journey we have undertaken. We know that many a times, we need to “Unlearn” few things before we “Learn” few things required for our next level of excellence. The ego plays its part in facilitating this process in reverse manner. It normally prevents us from unlearning, it does not accept that what ever he was doing was not correct, which actually gets portrayed as weakness and ego kind of becomes small. Ego never likes to become small so it prevents us from really accepting “unlearning”. We see many times during the discussion that we kind of “agree in principle” but do not actually implement the change agreed. If we do not implement the new things, we do not move to the higher level of excellence and higher level of ego. So, many a times, ego directs us to do things which will reduce the surrounding egos. This is detrimental and starts a negative spiral in our journey of excellence.

We now come to question whether ego is boon or bane for excellence?

Although the paragraphs above have depicted that ego can play boon and bane with respect to excellence; I believe that it can be used as boon if we are able to identify our ego. Many a times we take actions, which we feel right but they actually are dictated by our ego. So as mentioned earlier, if we act based on things we “agree in principle but do not act” we will be able to move forward. We will also need to look at our actions, if they seem to be against the over all direction of entire operations, that is typically result of negative spiral run by our ego. So we need to be aware of this and stop those actions. So “Ego is boon for excellence if we keep it in control”.