When Ego Stops Being Your Friend

"People say: 'Leave your ego at the door.' I say: 'Don't you dare.' Great artists. Great leaders. Great thinkers. Great creatives. Have strong egos. Without courage, strength (and a little arrogance) nothing would get done."

That's Chris Hirst, former Global CEO of Havas, writing last week about what drives high performance. He wants people with passion, who push back, with strong opinions, who irrationally believe they're the best, who throw darts at competitors' names. He doesn't want dicks, but nor does he want nice guys. He wants results.

It's a compelling argument. It represents the dominant view in high-performing business environments. And I think it's right about growth and catastrophically wrong about crisis.

I'm not Karl Pilkington's imaginary Bullshit Man - the superhero with flight and super-hearing whose only purpose was to fly through windows, point at people talking nonsense, shout "bullshit," and fly off again. But I do think there's something here worth unpacking because the distinction between ego and drive isn't just semantic - it's the difference between survival and collapse.

Defining the Beast

Let me be precise about what I mean by ego, because the whole argument hinges on definition: self-aggrandisement, elevation of self, attachment to status. The part of us that's primarily concerned with how we're seen, what position we hold, whether we're winning the comparison game.

And here's where Chris is absolutely right: ego works brilliantly when interests align. When the business is climbing, when self-interest and company interest point in the same direction, that competitive fire drives extraordinary results. The irrational belief that you're the best becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The passion, the pushback, the refusal to accept second place - these things genuinely do move mountains when you're building something.

I've seen it work. The founder who believes so completely in their vision that they drag reality along behind them through sheer force of will. The leader who's so committed to winning that the team catches fire from their certainty. The creative who's so attached to their work being brilliant that they push through revision after revision until it actually is.

But that's only half the story.

When Reality Stops Cooperating

The MD who kept restructuring his sales team and changing incentive schemes whilst customer complaints about product quality had tripled in six months. The founder who burned through four finance directors in two years rather than accept her pricing model was broken. The CEO who blamed market conditions for falling revenue whilst his two largest competitors were posting record growth.

I spent 12 years running a business through multiple crises and have sat with other leaders navigating their own. Over the past few months I've focused specifically on helping businesses in genuine trouble. Almost universally, they had plenty of drive, passion, and belief. What they lacked was self-honesty, and ego is what prevented it.

Because here's what ego does brilliantly: it edits. It curates the information that reaches your conscious awareness, filtering out anything that threatens your sense of self.

You see customer churn hitting 15% and ego whispers that they don't understand the value yet. You see three senior people resign in a month and ego says they weren't committed enough. You see revenue flatline for two quarters and ego points to market conditions everyone else is somehow navigating successfully. And because each interpretation protects your ego, you never see the pattern - three separate problems, three separate explanations, zero recognition that the common factor is you.

You're not lying to yourself consciously, you're just selecting the interpretation that protects your sense of self, and this is why self-awareness matters so much in leadership because it's the only thing that catches ego's editing before it becomes catastrophic.

Two Different Operating Systems

In crisis, self-protection and business-protection diverge completely, and you can see it in how leaders respond to the same situation:

Ego says: don't admit error because it threatens your authority. Drive says: admit error immediately so we can fix it.

Ego says: the strategy's sound, the team just needs to execute better. Drive says: the strategy's broken, what do we need to change?

Ego says: asking for help looks weak. Drive says: not asking for help is stupid.

Ego says: I need to be right. Drive says: this needs to work.

One protects the self. The other serves the goal. And in crisis, only one of them keeps you alive.

The Warning I Didn't Want to Hear

A couple of years ago I was at Lord's watching the Ashes with my godfather, an Australian who'd built and sold a business in the motor trade, creating generational wealth. I was supporting England, he was supporting Australia, and somewhere between overs I told him I'd been working hard to deconstruct and disassemble my own ego.

He looked at me with a wry smile and a sideways glance, as if this was something he'd seen before, something he'd played with himself, and said: "Be careful with that."

His view was that ego is what drives us, what motivates us to be successful and carve our place in the world. And he's not wrong. His results speak for themselves.

But his warning sat with me because my ego had been driving me for 12 years and he'd seen something I was only starting to recognise. My ego was what had driven me through crisis after crisis in my own business, but it was also what kept me there, flogging myself into the ground for something I wasn't actually passionate about. Every year I renewed my commitment not because the business needed me, but because I'd created this illusion that I had to build some nonspecific, undefined empire to prove to myself and everyone around me that I was a success.

When I was already thinking about exiting, already recognising the toxic nature of the ego I'd built my identity around, my answer was that there was a better life beyond that status obsession. But here was a man who had achieved success well beyond anyone's definition of capitalist achievement telling me that dissolution of ego wasn't the answer.

What I didn't fully understand then was that he was also telling me something else. Since selling his business, the phone had stopped ringing. He was no longer important in the way he'd been important. The things that had defined him for decades no longer applied. He'd had his own high-status comedown to navigate.

So his warning wasn't just about not dismantling ego, it was about understanding what happens when the external validation stops, whether you choose it or it chooses you.

When the Armour Comes Off

I've watched what happens in that moment carefully - when validation stops, when ego gets stripped away by circumstances you can't control, when the armour comes off whether you're ready or not. The leaders I've seen navigate crisis successfully, including myself eventually, all went through something brutal. Not a gentle reckoning but a complete dismantling of assumptions about themselves, their business, their capabilities. The revelation that they'd been operating with massive blind spots. The acceptance that they'd made serious errors of judgement that they'd been explaining away for months or years.

What's underneath when you strip away the self-aggrandisement, the status attachment, the need to be seen as winning - that's what determines whether you survive or not.

Sometimes there's nothing there. The ego was load-bearing, and without it the person collapses. They can't function if they're not winning, can't operate if they're not the smartest person in the room, can't lead if their status is threatened. These are the leaders who double down on failing strategies because admitting error costs too much psychologically, who blame everyone else rather than examine their own decisions, who exit the business entirely rather than accept a reduced role.

But sometimes there's personal drive underneath that's been there all along, just buried under the ego's noise. Grit that doesn't need external validation. Determination that exists independent of status. What survived the humbling for those who made it through was drive, but drive with the self-delusion burned away. They stopped needing to be right and started needing to fix the problem. They stopped protecting their status and started protecting the business.

This isn't the same as becoming nice guys who produce fluff. They're still demanding, still pushing, still refusing to accept failure. But the motivation has shifted from "I need to win" to "this needs to work," and that shift changes everything about how they operate. It looks like walking into a board meeting and opening with "I got this wrong, here's what we're changing" rather than defending the previous strategy. Calling the competitor you've been dismissing and asking how they're solving the problem you're stuck on. Promoting the finance director who keeps challenging your assumptions instead of the sales director who keeps telling you what you want to hear.

What this gives you is the ability to admit error without it threatening your identity, to seek help without it diminishing your authority, to pivot strategy without it feeling like personal failure, to have hard conversations about performance including your own because ego isn't in the room making everything about status. And that's what separated the leaders who survived crisis from those who didn't - not the strength of their ego, but their capacity for self-awareness when it mattered most.

The Terrifying Bit

Chris is right about growth. I'm right about crisis.

And the terrifying bit is that you don't get to choose which battlefield you're on when the market shifts underneath you.

The leadership operating system that drives extraordinary results during growth becomes actively dangerous during crisis. But if you've built your entire identity on ego-driven motivation, you can't switch operating systems when the environment changes. You're locked in.

This isn't just about business performance. It's about what happens to people. I've watched what happens to leaders whose entire sense of self is wrapped up in winning, in being right, in maintaining status. When crisis strips that away - and crisis always strips it away eventually - some of them don't recover, not just professionally but personally. Depression. Relationship breakdown. Identity crisis that goes far beyond the business. Because if your entire sense of worth is built on external validation, what happens when the validation stops coming?

What It Cost Me

I know what that looks like because I've lived through it. Removing ego meant removing armour to reveal what was underneath, except the armour is completely opaque so you can't see through it whilst you're wearing it.

For me it meant confronting the fact that I'd spent 12 years identifying as a business leader when I wasn't truly passionate about the business itself. I'd let status become the answer to "what do you do?" at dinner parties because the world demands an answer that allows you to bristle with pride or forces you to lie.

Removing that identity meant rebuilding from the ground up. What I found underneath had always been there - a drive and determination not to sit still. Confronting that is brutal, but it's also freeing because once you know the difference between who you actually are and the status you've been protecting, you can't unknow it, and that self-awareness becomes what lets you operate effectively in both growth and crisis because you're no longer dependent on external circumstances to tell you who you are.

What We're Actually Talking About

Chris and I are calling different things by the same name. What he's describing as ego - the passion, the pushback, the refusal to quit, the irrational belief - might actually be drive, but we need different words for self-serving motivation versus purpose-serving motivation because they look identical going up and reveal their true nature coming down.

The real distinction, the one that matters when everything goes sideways, is self-awareness. The leaders who navigate both growth and crisis successfully aren't ego-less, they're aware enough to catch when ego is running the show versus when drive is. They can feel the difference between "I need to win" and "this needs to work." They know when their attachment to being right is clouding their judgement about what's actually true.

That self-awareness is what lets you use ego's energy during growth without becoming its prisoner during crisis. It's what lets you be passionate and driven and competitive without being blind. It's the thing that means you can still lead when you're not winning, still function when your status is threatened, still push when the irrational belief meets reality and loses.

Because crisis reveals character, and what it often reveals is that ego and drive aren't the same thing at all. One serves the self. The other serves the goal. And which one is actually running your show determines whether you survive when everything goes sideways.

The Question

So Chris, and everyone else who believes ego drives results: what's your plan for when the battlefield changes and that ego you're celebrating becomes the thing that blinds you to reality? Because you won't know it's happened until it's already cost you six months and half your cash runway.

I spent 12 years navigating the moment when ego-driven operating systems stop working, when the competitive fire that powered growth prevents the honesty required for survival, when the irrational belief crashes into reality and reality wins. And now I work with leaders facing exactly that inflection point.

I'd genuinely like to debate this further because I suspect both our positions contain truth that depends entirely on context. Your battlefield is growth and high performance. Mine is crisis and turnaround. The capabilities that drive success in each look similar on the surface but might be operating from completely different engines underneath.

Understanding when ego serves us and when it betrays us might be one of the most important distinctions leaders can make, even if we're still figuring out how to name what we're describing.

Because the leaders who make it through both growth and crisis aren't the ones with the strongest ego or the least ego. They're the ones who know the difference between ego and drive, and can tell which one they're operating from before it's too late.

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Marc Richard helps business leaders navigate crisis and turnaround. If you're facing the moment when your operating system needs to change, or want to debate this further, find him at marcdrichard.com