The Subtle Ways In Which Ego Shows Up at Work
You may not realize it, but your ego plays out in many different ways. It quietly seeps into the decisions you make, the way you communicate and how you present yourself. It often shows up as defensiveness, insecurity, control and the need to protect image.
When your goal is to raise your self-esteem, prove to others that you’re smart, intelligent and capable or projecting an image of strength matters to you, your ego gets involved in everything you say and do.
Becoming argumentative when someone disagrees.
Trying to be right by proving others wrong.
Never accepting your mistakes.
Becoming a control freak.
If you don’t consciously watch out for ego, it can damage your relationships at work by coming across as arrogant, selfish, condescending, snobbish and superior. Considering your own ideas, thoughts and opinions as important while holding others in contempt, showing impatience or disrespect through eye-rolling, smirking or sighing or invalidating other people’s feelings, brushing off their suggestions or changing the subject to deflect attention away from an uncomfortable topic are some of the ways in which you may act when your ego feels threatened.
Competitiveness is an important force in life. It’s what drives the market and is behind some of mankind’s most impressive accomplishments. On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in. Only you know the race you’re running. That is, unless your ego decides the only way you have value is if you’re better than, have more than, everyone everywhere. More urgently, each one of us has a unique potential and purpose; that means that we’re the only ones who can evaluate and set the terms of our lives. Far too often, we look at other people and make their approval the standard we feel compelled to meet, and as a result, squander our very potential and purpose.
― Ryan Holiday
You can either let your ego run the show which can stagnate your career and degrade your work experience or you can keep it in check by watching out for these small ways in which ego shows up at work:
Resisting help to prove you can do it yourself
When your pride and ego gets tangled up, you fear reaching out and asking for help. You don’t want to risk appearing incompetent. You don’t want to appear weak. You’ve built an identity of an independent person who can overcome any challenge. You want to protect it.
Asking for support feels like surrender when you put up a facade of strength and resilience. It feels like giving up and appearing vulnerable, defenseless and exposed. Hiding your struggles, covering up your feelings of doubt and inadequacy and masking your limitations does not raise your status—it only protects your ego.
Knowing your limits and saving your time by leveraging others’ expertise is a strategic move, not surrender. Accepting reality when you hit a roadblock instead of refusing to give up and pretending everything is fine signals high emotional intelligence, self-awareness and maturity of a person who prioritizes the right outcome over personal pride.
Asking for help does not make you look needy or incompetent. It requires humility and strength. It shows that you believe in your ability to find answers—that you’re open to do the work necessary to succeed.
Asking for help is a power move. It’s a sign of strength to ask and a sign of strength to fight off judgment when other people raise their hands. It reflects a self-awareness that is an essential element in braving trust.
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead
Ego check: Is your priority to solve the problem or protect your image?
Taking feedback personally
Your ego considers any constructive criticism as a personal attack. It forces you to obsess about a negative remark and view it as a measure of your self-worth. It makes you extremely insecure and jumpy about anything that concerns your skills and abilities. It keeps you trapped within your own bubble of self-assessment away from reality.
This makes you defensive—you instantly reject feedback without hearing others out. You look for excuses or blame to justify your results or the outcomes you achieved. You may even counter-attack by belittling others or calling out their own gaps. Ego makes you edgy, reactive, easily irritable and closed-off. You start doubting others’ intent. You turn an important critique into a debate.
Ignoring feedback or putting up a shield of self-defense lets ego protect what it cares about—your self-image. It thinks highly of you which makes it shun down the critiques that are necessary to grow.
Constructive criticism is not an attack on your identity or a sign of disrespect. It’s a useful tool to stay grounded, sensible and open to suggestions. It helps you bridge the gap between perception and reality by uncovering your blind spots and helping you focus on areas that need correction. Putting ego aside can help you pay attention to others inputs, separate signal from noise and accept and acknowledge the hard facts.
Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
— Scott H. Young, Ultralearning
Ego check: Is your priority to look flawless right now or become better over time?
Struggling to admit mistakes or saying you were wrong
When you fail at something or make mistakes, instead of showing curiosity to understand what went wrong and taking responsibility for your actions, you may look for excuses and justifications. You may blame others or your circumstances. You may try to cover up your faults. Your ego will not let others discover your flaws, be judged or exposed. It will not let you accept defeat.
To hide your feelings of guilt, shame and inadequacy, you may mislead others, give them false information or deflect attention away from your mistakes. You may refuse to accept you were wrong or made an error. Fear that others will think less of you or you’ll look weak can make you cover up your tracks instead of owning them.
Given a choice, ego will choose denial over reality to keep your self-esteem intact. It wants you to think you’re smart, capable and always right and accepting a failure can shatter that image.
Acknowledging that you made a bad decision or took a wrong action does not make you a failure. It does not harm your reputation or credibility. Rather, taking ownership of your outcomes, finding a solution to your problem and working harder to fix the issue earns you respect—it shows that you can bounce back from a challenging situation stronger and smarter.
Being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem.
― Edward De Bono, Po
Ego check: Is your priority to be right or be effective?
Turning disagreements into personal battles
When you’re too attached to an idea or a viewpoint, any difference of opinion on it turns into a battle. You make it a part of your identity. Confirming views raises your confidence and boosts your self-esteem while disagreements instantly put you off. Your ego does not like dissent and triggers an intense response to shut down opposing views. It keeps you locked inside a tunnel vision where you fail to see the value in alternate perspectives.
Trying hard to prove your point without showing curiosity to listen invites pushback. Repeating your ideas and thoughts while disregarding others views makes you come across as closed-minded, argumentative and arrogant. This creates tension, strains relationships and makes others reluctant to work with you.
Your ego prevents you from seeing the flaws in your thinking—it makes you too rigid to notice the risks and drawbacks. To defend your image, it stamps others as ignorant, flawed or malicious. It creates a false illusion that your opinions signify your worth and someone challenging your idea is inherently challenging you.
Disagreements are not an attack on your identity. They are not a battle ground to win and lose. They’re an opportunity to create win/win situations—look at new ideas, see what you missed and collaborate with others to solve the problem together instead of attacking them. When you approach disagreements with the desire to find the right solution instead of being right, you make others feel safe, heard and valued. It strengthens your work relationships while also setting you up for success. Separate who you are from the idea you are fighting for. If someone proves your idea or argument is wrong, your identity shouldn’t feel crushed.
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
― Colin Powell, It Worked for Me
Ego check: Is your priority to learn the truth or to win?
Refusing to let go of control
When you identify your worth with the outcomes you achieve, you have a hard time letting go—it’s too terrifying to trust anyone else to do the job as well and as correctly as you will. This makes you micromanage, refuse to delegate and be involved in the nitty-gritties of every day work. Your ego also fears being no longer needed or valued if things go well without your intervention.
This makes you too involved and too controlling to avoid feelings of shame and embarrassment if things go wrong later. You create dependencies, bottleneck decisions and withhold information to feel important. You dictate how things must be done, making others feel undervalued and suffocated. You jump in prematurely to fix situations without giving others room to self-correct or learn from their mistakes.
Your ego likes to feel secure and superior—dictating how others act and controlling every move makes it feel safe by avoiding future failures and surprises. It equates letting go with being weak, useless and unimportant because it wants to prove that you exist and that you matter.
Letting go is not giving up. It shows that you trust others, believe in their skills and their ability to learn from their mistakes and solve problems on their own. It not only creates space for others to grow, it also gives you time to focus on your own goals and priorities.
You don’t need to control everything that’s happening. You don’t need to push, struggle, fight, force things or try to manipulate people in order to make things the way you want them to be. It’s exhausting and unnecessary.
― John Purkiss, The Power of Letting Go
Ego check: Is your priority to achieve the best outcome or to have things done your way?
Interrupting others to redirect attention towards you
When your ego demands attention, it wants you to be at the centre of every meeting and discussion. It wants you to have the final word, be heard and can’t take it when others appear to be dominating the discussion. It doesn’t like when others get the spotlight. It feels hurt when someone else appears to be capturing interest and attracting attention.
This makes you say and do things that will redirect the focus towards you—hijacking the conversation by interrupting, giving unsolicited advice, passing mean remarks, fault finding or one-upping them by sharing your own experience.
Trying to hog the spotlight and focusing on an opportunity to speak prevents you from processing what the other person is saying. Cutting others off frustrates them as they lose their chain of thought. Treating every conversation as a competition for status and validation turns it into an exhausting game which only leads to loss of trust and backlash.
You cannot learn if your focus is on talking. You cannot build trust if you can’t celebrate others and let them shine. Deep connection is built by making others feel heard, valued and respected—not by owning the room at all times.
To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention. Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done (“Here, let me show you.” “Don’t be shy.” “That’s awesome!” “Smile for Daddy.”). Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing.
― Kate Murphy, You’re Not Listening
Ego check: Is your priority to make a connection or make an impression?
Refusing to revisit decisions
When a decision you made earlier is no longer working for you, when the cost of continuing is more than its benefits and when you can no longer justify the investment in a certain direction, the right thing to do is to pivot, invest in other opportunities or simply quit. However, your ego can make changing course feel like a failure. Quitting can feel like giving up and accepting defeat.
Ego can make you continue investing in a failed cause because it can’t let go of the past investments and calling it quits. Instead of evaluating the opportunity cost of continuing, you focus on the sunk costs. Fear of being judged as incompetent, reckless or a failure makes you maintain an illusion of progress. You don’t want to lose your status. You don’t want to lose face.
Giving up on a failing path or changing direction is not weakness—it’s an act of intelligence to save your future from your past. It shows that you’re capable of making tough and uncomfortable calls. It’s a sign of agility and progress.
Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t give this another chance? The second is project completion: if I keep investing, I can finish the project. But the single most powerful factor is ego threat: if I don’t keep investing, I’ll look and feel like a fool. In response to ego threat, people invest more, hoping to turn the project into a success so they can prove to others—and themselves—that they were right all along.
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take
Ego check: Is your priority to save face or maximize your future potential?
Avoiding people who challenge your thinking
When you pride yourself on your knowledge and expertise, anything that you don’t understand or don’t know appears terrifying and intimidating. You don’t want to appear uninformed. You don’t want to be in a position where you can’t make decisions or lead the group. To avoid appearing ignorant, you avoid people who have the tendency to ask tough questions. You avoid those who typically challenge your thinking. Your ego does not let you accept that it’s normal to not know everything.
You refuse to say “I don’t know” or “I am not sure” because your pride tells you that it will make you appear as someone who lacks experience, wisdom or judgment. So, you either pretend to know or avoid facing such situations. Faking knowledge makes you come across as a fake—others can see when you truly know something and when you’re just faking it. Avoiding situations where you might be challenged prevents you from learning and growing.
Not knowing something does not make you inferior or less valued by others. What matters more is your curiosity, ability to ask questions and the quality of finding the right solution over trying to be right. What leaves a lasting impact is your humility and courage.
Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know. Most people make bad decisions because they are so certain that they’re right that they don’t allow themselves to see the better alternatives that exist. Radically open-minded people know that coming up with the right questions and asking other smart people what they think is as important as having all the answers. They understand that you can’t make a great decision without swimming for a while in a state of “not knowing.” That is because what exists within the area of “not knowing” is so much greater and more exciting than anything any one of us knows.
― Ray Dalio, Principles
Ego check: Is your priority to hide from what you don’t know or to grow from what you can discover?
Summary
- Asking for help is not a sign of weakness or incompetence. It is a strategic and self-aware move that shows you prioritize the right outcome over protecting your pride.
- Constructive criticism is not an attack on your identity but a valuable tool that helps you uncover blind spots, bridge the gap between perception and reality and grow over time.
- Taking ownership of your failures and working to fix them does not damage your reputation. In fact, it earns you far more respect than making excuses or blaming others ever would.
- When you separate your identity from your opinions, disagreements become opportunities to discover new perspectives, collaborate effectively and find better solutions together.
- Micromanaging and refusing to delegate signals a lack of trust. Letting go not only empowers others to grow but also frees you to focus on what truly matters.
- Constantly hijacking conversations to stay in the spotlight destroys trust and connection. Making others feel genuinely heard and valued is what builds lasting relationships.
- Holding on to a failing path just to avoid looking wrong is costly. Recognizing when to change course and acting on it is a sign of agility, courage and good judgment.
- Dodging tough questions and difficult people stunts your growth. Embracing what you don’t know with curiosity and humility is what leads to better decisions and continuous learning.
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