Eliminate your ego and become a superhero

As every organization focuses on finishing strong in the final quarters of this year, it’s doubly important to put aside ego to focus on your company’s mission. But like a great physician, one must understand and diagnose what the ego is before coming to a conclusion about the solutions to this systemic epidemic.

What is the ego? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as the opinion you have about yourself. This is a great textbook definition; however, we have all had instances in school where text and reality differed. Consider my early Saturday morning barbershop conversation. In the barbershop, he usually listened to conversations that ranged from sports to politics. However, on this particular day, I had the privilege of eavesdropping on an old man who was hoping to get his haircut from him. With his voice worthy of James Earl Jones, he told his friend prattling about the success of Floyd Mayweather, Jr., “The ego is when you take the weather report personally.”

This simple observation of wisdom was clever! It made me reflect on my own personal interactions that were embodied in the compounds of his thought. In my experience, I have found that the ego is nothing more than pride in its swollen state. For example, a gentleman (no pun intended for my Cleveland Cavs fans) is extremely pompous when it comes to his money, position, education, etc. He exhibits ego in his character and illustrates it in his actions. It is unfounded, authoritarian and arrogant. His head is swollen like the swelling caused by an allergic insect bite. He often thinks very highly of himself and very little of others.

The EpiPen for this type of narcissism is not as easy to fix as you might think. It does not lie in simply substituting vocabulary words like “I” for “we” or “I” for “they.” To remove the ego you must become a hero through servant leadership. The founder of servant leadership, Robert Greenleaf, coined it in his essay as such, “The servant leader is servant first…it begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice leads one to aspire to lead.”

A practical way as a leader to extinguish a selfish mindset and achieve desired results for your stakeholders is to demonstrate characteristics of empathy, listening, stewardship, and a commitment to personal growth toward others. I have often told my apprentices, “Service is the rent you pay for the space you occupy here on Earth.” Although aliens may not factor into this logic, it is easy to see that we all have a duty to serve a purpose greater than our own.

Christopher Reeve was known as the famous superhero who acted as “The Man of Steel” on the television screen. Off the television screen, he was known as an inspiration in real life through his painstaking efforts to overcome paralysis. Speaking of the superhero he played on television, he said: “What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and maturity to use his power wisely.”

So how do you become faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to jump tall buildings in one jump? It is easy. how do you have servant leader you must be willing to CHANGE

• againstConsider the transition as a burden for personal development to improve the likelihood of each stakeholder in your organization.
• Hwith an empowering environment that merits and inspires service, that identifies the importance of each person and that encourages the achievement of everyone’s abilities.
• HASAcquire service as a central credential that everyone who acquires the role of leader must do so out of a passion to be of service to others.
• NOCultivate service morale by establishing circumstances where anyone can discover useful work and achievement through their participation.
• GRAMArner engagement as a way to induce impact from the individual rather than coping or using some other incomplete form of encouragement.
• meevangelize consensus building in motto circumstances where people can have faith in each other and move forward together, as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ultimately, servant leaders like the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. realized that leadership is not strictly about oneself, as the ego may want you to think, but as he conveyed, “The most urgent question in life is: What are you doing for others?