Harnessing the Ego (eBook)

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The Operations Order

Our Shared Situation

When you first wake up in the morning, how do you feel when you think about the very first encounter of the day that you will have with other humans? Does the thought of that first human encounter make you happy or annoyed? If your first meeting of the day usually consists of waving at your neighbors and exchanging pleasantries, you’re fortunate and I hope that small blessing sets the tone for the rest of your day. A casual conversation with neighbors is like a memory of how we used to manage our lives and our journey through civil society, not that long ago. In recent memory things were different, before we turned inward as a society and dived headfirst into a world of road rage and talking at a screen and actively looking for ways to think of strangers as others. The situation our society faces today is dire. I’m concerned that we’re leaving a mess for ourselves and for the future generations that are going to have to fix our mistakes.

My Mission

I’m not naïve enough to think I can singlehandedly change the world, but I know from experience consisting of both mistakes and successes that I can change my small part of it, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’ve assigned a mission to myself to write this book with some thoughts about harnessing the ego in order to live as a grounded individual, because grounded individuals are the most effective at improving the lives of those around them through small and consistent and enduring ways.

Your Mission

This is a deeply personal choice and despite all this “mission” language, I’m not here to tell you what you should do. I believe that a life lived serving others and improving the parts of the world in which we spend the most time serves our purpose for being here on this rock. But that’s just my opinion and this is about you. This is your journey and if you already feel the pull of your own mission to make some positive impact in the world around you, I’m offering a template with which to organize some aspects of your day-to-day life, in a consistent manner. In other words, in the only ways that are truly sustainable: small but consistent and enduring, and effective even when tested by the chaos of our short-term focused world.

The Plan

I’m writing this book to suggest an approach for managing the ego that I believe will help professionals making their way through organizational life succeed and positively impact the lives of those around them. I hope this message is especially helpful for individuals working their way up from the lowest ranks of an organization. I’m referring to the people driving shuttle busses from the airport to a rental car lot or leading a shift at a restaurant. People who observe their manager or manager’s manager and say to themselves, “I think I can do that job.” People who might have some aspects of their past or present situations that they need to overcome, and who are doing so, but who might still benefit from a little encouragement. You are my heroes, and you’re the people who need to change things for the better because the so-called expert class has had their chance and failed. The experts can keep doing what they’re doing (which primarily consists of enriching themselves) but it’s also your turn now. I don’t know you personally so when I say this book is for you, it means I’m paying it forward and writing a thank you note for those who have helped me succeed.

To help enable your journey, I’m going to suggest some approaches to help you overcome any mental reservations you might have, so you can succeed and attain a place in life where you can in turn help others succeed. We’re going to focus our attentions on the part of our lives where we spend most of our time away from our families: work.

This book is for professionals in the workplace and will most likely end up in the self-help section of book sellers and libraries. That’s probably the best place for it because it’s meant to help the reader, but I’m not proposing an easy path. I’m not offering a “five easy steps” type of advice on how to succeed in your chosen profession and/or make a lot of money. My cycle has five steps and none of them are easy, but don’t worry about that for now. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably already on the way to achieving your goals, since generally people who really need self-help books don’t read them. I’m embarking on this journey with the ultimate goal of helping our manic, ego-centric, consumer-focused society be slightly more grounded, and better. The only way that will happen is through intentional actions of individuals who others listen to and learn from.

Sustaining the Journey

I’ve told you this is a book about leadership and right now you might be looking for the executive summary so you can move on to other things in your busy life. Here it is. Don’t be a short-term maximizer, expecting yourself and others around you to solve problems and build effective systems quickly and permanently. This is a book about long term effectiveness. If you’re looking for the “bottom line” right now, you’ve probably been captured by a system that trains your ego to operate in the short term, which is the domain in which our systems and organizations exist. I have some thoughts on how to work through that domain to be truly effective at whatever our mission is in life.

I’m writing this book as a form of giving back. We hear that phrase “giving back” a lot. It’s usually tied to a volunteer opportunity or a request to donate to a charity, both of which are certainly admirable acts. We can also give back by our daily actions. For those of you rolling your eyes right now, I’ll explain. If you can effectively manage your ego, you’ll create space in your own mind for the fullest range of options and will demonstrate your ability to achieve legitimate and authentic results while improving the lives of those around you. You’ll achieve a reputation as an authentic professional and will demonstrate your ability to be trusted with authority. You’ll be able to develop the best leader your organization has ever seen. You’ll be running your program(s) in the most impactful and effective ways possible, unhindered by dishonesty to yourself or personality-driven appeals to authority. You’ll create an authentic executive presence based on the reality of people wanting to be on your team. You’ll be lifting up others, giving them opportunities, and making them want to be better. You won’t just be a taker, operating on your own fear and others’ fear of you. I believe we can have a world where that fear-based style doesn’t need to be the default approach to making things happen in the workplace.

Fair warning—this is a journey and taking my advice won’t automatically put you at the top of whatever short term-focused hierarchy you stumbled into or let yourself be told to be part of when you were an impressionable college sophomore. First, you’ll need to overcome some hurdles that our short-term-focused society has placed in your path, and even though your results will speak for themselves you will also have to be a champion for your team. You will need to overcome the tendency to place more importance on the short-term requirement than the long-term approach for success.

Organizational leadership often uses the ego and its unlimited capacity for wanting more to grind the maximum level of effort out of the lower-level employees of an organization, and this book is about managing that same ego. Your ego, which can be an effective tool for you but can also be the source of your downfall. You can see the risk of having a different style than a senior leader who rose to the top of their hierarchy at the expense of their health, relationships, and goodwill of those around them. My humble request is that you take this journey with me and decide how to apply the principles in this book in a way that puts food on your own table but also helps us all be a little better, as well as a little more empathetic and grounded. I know you’re capable of that because frankly I doubt you would have read this far if you were a sociopath.

So, please give this approach a chance. If you read this book and after some deliberation decide it’s all bullshit, I thank you for giving these concepts some thought and ask that when you encounter people-focused, grounded individuals you put a few of them on your team. Having some diversity of thought in your leadership sphere will be good for you and your organization. When you realize your ego-harnessing people are your most effective leaders and producers I promise I won’t give you a hard time about it. After all, I couldn’t because I don’t know you! This book is our ultimate safe space and in it we will all give ourselves the grace necessary to challenge our opinions and some of the dogma that may have shaped our lives up to this point. If your life is one short-term pursuit after another, I’m going to frustrate you with this book so thank you in advance for pressing on with it.

This is not a memoir, although I’ll tell some short stories from the very beginning of my own personal journey. Besides my grandmother and me, those stories and the fictional characters I’ve created are not based on any individuals from my past or present and are most definitely not indictments of the styles of the leaders and managers in my life, all of whom have helped me grow in one way or another. I’m writing this book with gratitude for everyone who gave me a chance, and in hopes that I can share some hard-earned lessons from my own observations of organizational...