The Question That Exposes Your Blind Spot as a Leader

Most leaders think they know themselves, but 95% of behavior is unconscious. Learn the one question that reveals your hidden Ego and transforms your impact.

Today’s post is by Christie Garcia, author of Your Ego Is Showing: How Ego Management Unlocks Authentic Confidence and Meaningful Success.

I fell three stories off a fire escape on a Friday morning in San Francisco. When the paramedics arrived, my first concern was whether I could still throw my holiday party that evening.

That moment was a perfect portrait of my Ego running completely unchecked. I have what I call a Controller Ego. Controllers are driven by achievement, push hard, move fast, and pride themselves on handling anything and everything. The downside is that we also tend to be emotionally unavailable, hyper-rational in moments that call for real emotions, and completely blind to the “real” impact we have on the people around us.

That blindness is what I want to talk about, because it is not just a Controller problem. It is a human problem, and it may be the single most expensive leadership habit you have right now.

In my work as an executive coach, I have found that 95 percent of the time, leaders are operating on autopilot. Their Ego, the unconscious brain, is driving every decision, every reaction, every conversation. The unsettling truth is that everyone around them can see it. They are usually the only ones who cannot.

I call this the self-awareness gap.

There are three Ego types I work with: the Complier, the Protector, and the Controller. Each has real gifts which are often our biggest weaknesses when overused. I like to call these overused gifts our liabilities or our Ego tactics. These tactics quietly sabotage our relationships, happiness, and success in both work and life. With almost two decades of coaching, I have yet to meet a leader who has not identified with at least one of them.

The Complier is warm, easy to work with, and deeply people-oriented. The liabilities of the Complier Ego is that they forfeit their power to keep the peace. I worked with a leader I will call Diane. She was a beloved director at a mid-size nonprofit, the kind of person everyone wanted on their team. But in every senior leadership meeting, she would agree with whoever spoke last, even when she privately disagreed. She told herself she was being collaborative. What she was actually doing was accumulating resentment quietly, until one day she sent an email to her executive director that was so out of character it blindsided everyone, including Diane herself. When we unpacked it, she realized she had been swallowing her truth for nearly two years. Her Complier Ego had convinced her that speaking up was a threat to being liked. What it actually cost her was her credibility.

The Protector leads with integrity and logic. They are often the most principled person in the room, and the most guarded. I think of a client I will call Marcus, a COO who was brilliant at strategy and notoriously hard to read. His team respected him but never felt close to him. When a high performer resigned, she told HR that she never felt like Marcus believed in her. Marcus was floored. He had been her biggest internal advocate for two years. The problem was that his Protector Ego had built walls so effectively that his support was never communicated to the employee. He assumed she knew how proud of her he was. One of the Protector’s liabilities is their black-and-white thinking. They struggle to see the gray, which prevents them from sharing details, giving praise, or telling people how they really feel (both good and bad). Most often, the Ego’s beliefs are that people should know how he feels, they should just do their job, and results speak for themselves. Unfortunately, in this situation, they did not. His team needed to hear it from him directly, and he had no idea that was missing.

The Controller, my own dominant Ego, is ambitious, decisive, and gets things done. The liabilities of the Ego are that we tend to define success through accomplishments and unintentionally make the people around us feel like tools rather than partners. A client I will call Tom was a sales director who consistently hit his numbers and consistently lost his top performers. The exit interviews always pointed to the same theme; he was inspiring to be around but exhausting to work for. Nothing was ever quite good enough and they can always accomplish more. Tom’s first instinct when I shared this was to defend his high-quality work and standards. His second, once he got quiet, was to admit he had no idea how to celebrate a win before moving to the next one. His Controller Ego had convinced him that satisfaction was the enemy of improvement. What it was actually doing was burning out the very people he needed most.

Here is what all three of these leaders had in common. They were not trying to create these problems. Their Egos were running the show unconsciously, and nobody brought these liabilities to their awareness without triggering their Ego. Once they heard the feedback in a productive way, they were able to look in the mirror and truly find the value in the feedback.

This is where Ego Management begins. Not with fixing yourself, but with seeing yourself clearly and taking ownership of your unintended impact.

Once you choose to acknowledge the perception of your impact and start owning this truth you can get curious. What is my part in this? Not what went wrong, not who dropped the ball, but where did I contribute to this outcome? It is a question the Ego prevents you from asking yourself. It doesn’t want you to know the truth. It wants you to stay stuck, disappointed, unsatisfied, and in the drama of life and relationships. Diane started asking it before every difficult meeting. Marcus started asking it when a relationship felt distant. Tom started asking it every time someone on his team went quiet.

The Ego never fully goes away. It grows with you and gets smarter as you learn about it. The goal is not to eliminate it but to recognize it early enough to choose differently. One percent better today. And then again tomorrow.

That is how leaders stop letting their Ego show and start letting their best self lead.

Christie Garcia is an executive coach and the founder of Mindful Choice, a leadership development company. Her book Your Ego Is Showing: How Ego Management Unlocks Authentic Confidence and Meaningful Success is available wherever books are sold. Learn more at mindfulchoiceacademy.com/book.

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