It’s all about the ego

As we approach the end of the year, many people start thinking about the resolutions they want to make for the new year.  I know the data suggest that folks shouldn’t bother, as the vast majority won’t keep them beyond the first month (if they make it past the first week).

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Nevertheless, for those of you who try each year to make them and stick to them, I’d like to suggest one that if all of us in the nonprofit sector stuck to (even for that first month) would mean great progress in delivering our sector’s implied promise of improving the well-being of community and individuals.  That resolution:  lose your (non-Freudian) ego.

Four unrelated events, all of which speak to the downside of egos, are fueling this suggested resolution.  In order of their occurrence, they are:

• My graduate class was discussing the health and well-being of collective impact: dead before it got started, or chugging along?  While no one in the class was willing to deliver the eulogy just yet, there was general consensus that it has its challenges in trying to thrive.  One of the common struggles identified was egos:  the egos of the organizations and their representatives getting in the way of creating a shared vision and set of goals, of compromise, of a willingness to play a lesser role rather than a lead role, etc.  Instead of remembering that collective impact is about improving outcomes for individuals and communities, too many efforts were thwarted because an individual or organization wanted top billing, to be the backbone organization, to take the credit, to have their model be “the” model, etc.  Egos trumped working on behalf of some portion of the public good—the raison d’etre of the nonprofit sector.
• At an all-day class for board members and executives to work on strengthening the board-executive director partnership, I shared the question a member of a peer learning circle had asked her peers: how honest are you with your board?  I’ve repeated this story a couple of times to groups of executive directors only and I always get a reaction.  This time I got nothing but blank faces looking back at me.

In response to my expression of surprise at getting no response—not even via body language—a man in the group offered up his explanation.  Working in the for-profit world, he doesn’t expect honesty—ever, and always assumes that he is hearing some degree of truth and some degree of positioning.  No one refuted this or offered up an alternative.  As I was externally prattling on to the group about the importance of honesty, trust and transparency in any healthy partnership, internally I was thinking about the reasons people are less than honest and transparent in a partnership.  Why do we lie and spin?  To save face, to divert blame or responsibility, to mislead.  In other words, to save ego.

• A few nights later, the one-two punch, in an effort to be an informed and educated citizen, I made the mistake of trying to watch the Republican candidates’ debate. Having grown up in Washington, DC, and having spent my “informative” years, and many thereafter, around politicians, I know what they can be like. One of my current laments about today’s politicians is that they are not the politicians of my youth—folks who would cross the aisle for the common cause, who could, for the most part, keep their egos in check.  (And I get it; you don’t run for political office if you don’t have a big, solid ego.)

But Governor Christie said it best when he waited patiently for the floor to be given to him and, before answering the question asked of him, said to the audience:  what you see here is what happens on the floors of Congress.  In other words, the battle of the pecking order of egos!

Granted, there were too many people up there, and, yes, much as it pains me to say this, the journalists were awful with their own behavior and questions, but the candidates were a disgrace!  Continual talking over one another, failure to play by the rules, whining about being ignored, fighting to answer some of the poorest, most useless questions I’ve heard asked at a debate and the list goes on.  And why?  To inform the public of their strategies and tactics?  To build people’s confidence in their ability to lead?  Hardly!  It was all about egos.

• And, finally, the next day, as I was driving to my office, I heard that the decision of the Los Angeles Unified School District to close the schools for one day due to a terroristic threat is being investigated to determine if it was the right/best decision. Who, pray tell, is trying to make a name for him/herself? Whose ego is driving this one?

Yes, the LA schools closed while New York City schools, which received a similar threat, remained open.  One region recently suffered greatly at the hands of terrorism; the other has had time for those wounds to heal some.

Why would any jurisdiction waste resources—human, dollar, time, energy—to investigate this decision?  It was made; kids missed a day of school; nothing happened; kids are all safe; let’s move on.  (While some parents and guardians may have grumbled about missing work or finding child care, as a parent, I can’t help believing that was a much better option than making funeral arrangements.)

Spend those resources on addressing the fact that schools are such soft targets and what might be done to harden them some without destroying the school environment we want.  Spend those resources on better communication and information sharing among law enforcement agencies.  Spend them on moving forward, not looking at a past decision that could have gone either way, as it obviously did if you look at LA and NYC.  In both situations, we should be grateful that we aren’t, yet again, in mourning.  But someone saw an opportunity to grab the limelight and rather than celebrate that nothing happened and that authorities took a good, precautionary step, and made it all about him/her.  Second guessing decisions that need to be made swiftly by people with more information than you is not about questioning the decision but all about self-promotion and ego.

Egos make problems where there are none and hinder, if not preclude, the finding of good solutions; they derail progress for the whole in favor of progress for the one.  So, give it up in 2016, or at least tamp it down some.