Solution-Building™: The Rules, Part 8
So far, in discussing the Guidelines, we’ve been talking about various aspects of the attitudes with which we go into decision-making meetings. To recap, those Guidelines were:
- Everyone plays by the same rules.
- You must come to the group ready and willing to participate.
- Treat everyone in the group with courtesy and respect.
- Act as though the person whose respect is most important to you is watching how you behave.
- No personal agendas allowed.
These are quite important as they address areas that are stumbling blocks to getting to effective decisions. But there is a bigger issue, too, that is about attitude: ego. Hence,
Guideline Number 6: Park your ego at the door or you don’t get a seat at the table.
I have written about ego in previous posts, but it is possibly the biggest offender when it comes to creating difficulty in reaching decisions and solving problems and I wanted to talk about it again.
The online version of the Cambridge English Dictionary defines ego, when used as a noun in this way:
“Your idea or opinion of yourself, especially your feeling of your own importance and ability:
That man has such an enormous ego – I’ve never known anyone so full of themselves!
I’m glad she got the job – she needed something to boost/bolster her ego (= give her confidence).”
That same source defines ego from the point of view of psychoanalysis:
“…the part of a person’s mind that tries to match the hidden desires (= wishes) of the id (= part of the unconscious mind) with the demands of the real world.”
The word ego is actually Latin for “I,” the first-person singular form for referring to one’s own self. In the late 19th Century, the word ego came into popular use from the work of Freud. It has a complex meaning in psychoanalysis and, if you look carefully at that definition, you can see that it is not as simple as “I.” Since the vast majority of us are not psychoanalysts, the most common use of ego is in conformance with the first definition above (as a noun), referring to the way individuals see themselves in relation to others.
Note that the two examples of the use of ego given above imply two extremes of the way ego can manifest itself in people. Note, also, that they both are generally considered as negative.
We all have an ego that helps us understand our abilities and capacities. Like all aspects of being human, that ego can greatly maximize our feelings of ability, capacity, and importance or it can just as greatly minimize them. It is probably fortunate that that range could be plotted on a bell curve with a very small proportion of us at the extremes.
What we are really talking about here is much broader than what most of us consider to be ego. We are talking about the very complex topic of personality. In addition to ego, psychoanalysis considers three other components of personality: id, alter ego, and superego.
The id is defined as:
“The deepest part of the unconscious mind that represents the most basic natural human needs and emotions such as hunger, anger, and the wish for pleasure”
While a definition of superego is:
“The part of your mind that knows what is right and what is wrong, and causes you to feel guilty when you do something wrong”
And alter ego is:
“the part of someone’s personality that is not usually seen by other people”
The interplay of these four components sum up to the way we present ourselves to others, at least in terms of what is commonly called ego. So ego is not negative (or positive, for that matter) in and of itself; the behavior that results from that 4-component interplay can be either positive or negative.
Let’s be sure to understand that it is the individual interpretation by others of that behavior that gives a positive or negative label. That interpretation, in turn, is influenced by the same set of interplaying components of those observers. This, of course, means that what some label as negative, others will consider to be positive, and vice-versa.
Having said all that, and introduced some complicated psychoanalytical concepts, I will return to the topic of ego, keeping in mind that the term is often conflated with personality and relates to the outward behavior of individuals.
Another thing we need to understand is that the way ego expresses itself in most of us depends on context. Each of us has something, usually several things, that we do well and often quite excellently. We also have things at which we are, to put it generously, poor. For instance, I am a very good teacher and, while I was in the lab, a talented synthetic chemist. But if you want a good laugh, put me on ice skates! Or ask me (you may have to force it) to write a sonnet. To say that I am poor at those, and others, would be an understatement. So all of us have talents and, well, non-talents. How we see ourselves in those areas, in other words our ego’s view of ourselves in them, will differ, as it should.
Where we can get into trouble, though, is when our ego view of our skills and abilities does not match up with reality. When our view of our abilities or importance become over-inflated (to the point of “enormous” in the example above) and we begin to believe we know more than anyone else, and we consider our thoughts and ideas as superior to those of others, we can easily fall into the potential trap of discounting those other thoughts and ideas and the people offering them up. Then we run the risk, the likelihood, of not being able to hear good, fresh, and new ideas and valid criticisms of other ideas. We can also alienate our colleagues involved in the decision-making process. We do this in many ways but dismissing other people’s thoughts and ideas in favor of our own, is, in my experience, very common and can be seen as an attack on themselves, and their egos as well, leading to unproductive clashes and conflicts rather than objective and courteous discussion of the issues.
Over-inflated ego is not the only potential area where trouble can arise and interfere with the full exchange of ideas. At the opposite end of that bell curve I mentioned earlier, we have some participants who do not believe they have the ability or knowledge to contribute to the discussion. They have a very depressed ego view. These individuals will not participate or offer any of their thoughts or ideas. This could mean that a really good idea is not even put onto the table.
So too much or too little ego can be a problem when making decisions or solving problems. This is a big issue and we will come back to it in the next post.