Pride: The Leader’s Greatest Adversary.

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18).

People expect you to have the answers.

You expect you to have the answers.

You’re the leader. You’re supposed to be the one that leads.

How can you lead if you don’t have all the answers?

‘I can’t look stupid in front of my people, I will lose their respect.’

So much of what people believe about leadership is trash. People think leadership is about looking good. It’s about always being right. It’s about being the single point failure in their teams or their organizations. I’ve watched ‘leaders’ spew complete madness from their mouths all in an effort to save face. Knowingly wrong, if confronted about said spews, they double down on their b/s, get defensive and abrasive and shut their teams down. There is something within us all that abhors being wrong, that loathes being caught with our proverbial pants down.

No one wants to be wrong. The only thing is….we’re not perfect. Our people know that we aren’t perfect. We know we aren’t perfect but there is this thing within us that compels us to travel down the yellow brick road of stupidity anyway and worse, bring the people we lead with us.

…its called pride.

Pride is the feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements. Now from the definition, it doesn’t appear to be the worst thing in the world. What’s wrong with being happy about your achievements or feeling well about being all around dope? Nothing when it’s partnered with appreciation, humility and empathy.

But there is a dark side of the force…

Pride, when its origin is self-centered, brings along with it conceit, arrogance and ultimately a superiority complex. We recognize what this looks like in real life.

You’re in a meeting and make a recommendation to the team about a different perspective and the ‘leader’ shuts you down and maybe even publicly humiliates you for the recommendation. Solely because of their own self centeredness, insecurity and pride. They weren’t the ones that came up with the answer so in their minds everyone is questioning why they should even be the leader. This type of pride corrupts from the inside out. This type of pride makes you believe that you must be the smartest person in the room. This type of pride makes you believe that you must be the center of attention. This type of pride makes you believe that you are better than everyone else.

Those are the leaders that ultimately fail miserably. Their team allows them to choose their own adventure and take the path of destruction. In this prideful state you don’t accept any feedback, advise, or wise counsel because your pride has made you think that you are above it all.

You must avoid allowing pride to hijack your leadership.

You must first recognize and admit your pride. “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.” ― Sophocles. It is impossible to destroy what you fail to confront. If we believe that we are without pride and conceit, we can be most assured that we are in fact prideful and conceited.

To further disarm the pride in our lives we must express gratitude. In doing so, we fail to feed our self centeredness and focus on the people we lead, you know, the ones who actually matter. Pride puts you in the center, gratitude puts the team at the center. No one ever accomplished anything significant by themselves.

Finally, we must subscribe to a model of leadership that chooses to serve. ‘The greatest among you shall be your servant’ Matthew 23:11. The goal of many leaders is to get people to think highly of them, the goal of great leaders is to help people think more highly of themselves. Leaders who serve seek don’t care who gets the credit, they don’t care about the accolades, they care only about how they can bring value to the people they lead so that they can be their best.

‘A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say; we did it ourselves. – Lao Tzu