Overcoming Ego to Embrace Collaboration

The 33rd president of the United States, Harry S. Truman once said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.” Putting that statement into practice is a key difference between the humble confidence and all out arrogance I referenced before. Let’s face it, we can all picture that one person’s face who’s been there and done that - regardless of the topic at hand. They’re the ones that know all there is to know, just ask them! When that’s someone with a lot of authority, it’s just a matter of time until there’s a proverbial train wreck.

Not long after moving into a human resources role full time, the manufacturing facility I had worked at for over fifteen years experienced sweeping changes within the local management team. I’ll spare my opinions on how and why that unfolded but will share that soon after, I was given the task of hiring thirty new team members just as we were moving into what had historically been our slowest time of year. I pushed back as much as I could; I didn’t have a seat in the weekly management team meetings so my input was filtered through my boss, who happened to be one of those new managers. History be damned, the expectation remained and I proceeded to do what I was told. Within sixty days of hiring those new team members, those not-so-omnipotent managers realized exactly why several of us “old timers” had pushed back. Orders had slowed down and we were over-staffed by, you guessed it, around 30 team members…

My next assignment was the second most difficult in my career: sitting down with each of those new team members, many of whom left good positions to accept work with us, to explain that through no fault of their own they were being laid off. Just in case you’re wondering, this was a very distant second to dialing the phone to notify a family member of workplace fatality. While far less difficult, I knew the impact this would have on each of them, I knew how infrequent this had happened in the fifty years the organization operated locally leading up to that point and how it would impact recruiting moving forward, and I knew that it shouldn’t have happened. Those new managers had no relationships with existing team members and had no interaction to speak of with those new hires we were now laying off; everyone was more of a number than an individual. Looking back, all of that could have been avoided had they been less focused on establishing their authority through sheer force. Had they been willing to overcome their egos and embraced the collaboration we offered, that difficult scenario would have likely been avoided - and the downward cultural spiral that facility experienced in the years that followed may not have rivaled something you’d have to be a certain height to go on at an amusement park.

The ones who pushed the hardest to make those ill-timed hires were nowhere to be found when it came time to deliver bad news one-on-one, but I never saw them miss an opportunity to suck up every ounce of credit they could - regardless of who deserved it. I’d guess Truman wouldn’t have respected them any more than those of us who dealt with them directly. 

Let’s compare that to what I shared before about Mark, serving as CEO of the most influential leadership organization in the world but constantly seeking input from every viable source available. It’s one thing when the input is coming from the President of Argentina, the CEO of Delta Airlines, or John Maxwell. For Mark to have the humility to not just accept but to seek input from someone like me, and I know I’m not the only one he does that with, serves as a prime example for how overcoming the slightest bit of ego allows him to embrace collaboration. With that level of humility, he’s able to receive feedback he may never have access to otherwise - so we’ll look at that next.