However, success can lull people into a false sense of security and occasionally, vanity. How is pride a problem?

Pride is about self. An organization, or a company, by definition, is about a group. What you’ve built together. With this kind of pride there is often a creeping arrogance. How does it surface?

People who see themselves as having built the business, who discount the importance of contributions by employees, allies and customers, display an arrogance built of self-importance.

This leads to an erroneous belief that they are the only ones capable of exercising good judgment. How do you know if this is relevant to you in your company?

• You don’t trust others to make important decisions

• You don’t truly turn over authority

• You end up thinking that you’re the only one who knows the answers---that you’re the only good thinker in the company

The result of this kind of self-importance? You waste the brainpower resident in your company.

You aren’t capitalizing upon the talents and potentials of your people.

No one is as good, or as bright, as everyone. How does it make sense for you to put everyone else’s brain on the sidelines?

If that is what you do, regardless of your intentions, you make communicating and deciding slower and more complicated processes than they need to be. There is no competitive advantage in that.

When information has to pass through many hands on its way up, and then back down the command pyramid, there are more places for miscommunication to occur.

The more gaps there are between the decision maker and the people who execute those decisions, the more opportunities there are for misconceptions and misunderstandings to occur.

If you can’t trust your people to think well---train them or fire them! It is a simple equation.

You most likely are not so geographically isolated that you have to rely on a bunch of dumb people to staff your company. Your competition can’t possibly get all the good ones, while you get only the dumb ones.

If your people are ignorant (unknowing rather than dumb) and you haven’t developed them over time, shame on you. If you don’t know how to train them, get help.

Don’t let your need for self-importance keep you from getting the right things done (see smart organizations).

You have led your organization to the success it has attained, but success is a moving target. If you maintain all significant control in the company, you limit the thinking capabilities of the organization as a whole. Here are two simple examples:

• If you second-guess decisions or show your lack of confidence in a manager in front of others, you wind up undercutting the credibility your management team has. In effect, you create an incompetence that might not be there otherwise.

• You can rob others of the energy, enthusiasm and joy that come from feeling they are making vital contributions to the success of the enterprise. The result is that people pull into themselves and contribute only a small percentage of what they could offer under more conducive circumstances.

Not only do you lose the brainpower of other members of your team, you also limit their ability to lead, innovate with self-assurance, or inspire confidence in those who work around them.

People want to feel they are important contributors. They want to feel that their contributions make a difference.

When you treat the company as if it is your personal preserve, you disenfranchise others.

Even if you privately and solely own the company, it is in your best interests to have your employees develop a strong personal identification with the business and it’s outcomes.

You want them passionately invested in the success of the business. As the leader, those are the attitudes you want to nurture and encourage.

Indulging your own sense of self-importance ultimately works against you.

• You can delude yourself into thinking that what you know is all that you need to know---or not.

• You can shut out input from others, even when it could be useful (who is going to step up to tell something to someone who already knows everything worth knowing?)---or not.

• You can make it unsafe for people in the organization to take risks to learn something new by only respecting those who act like they know everything already---or not.

There are tools and techniques for creating a shared understanding of your business idea.

As well as processes for developing talent through tactical conversations about the work.

And practical approaches to having your people provide each other with feedback about their performance, all of which contribute to collaboration for success.

When people in the work force are made to feel inferior, they will be less likely to admit that they don’t know something, and so will seek to pass the blame rather than problem solve when things go wrong.

Additionally, you limit yourself to constantly relying on your pre-established point of view. You end up constrained by your own blind spots.

The disadvantages of positioning yourself this way are apparent in how your company operates.

To top it off, you’ve already paid for the talent of the whole employee, not just their strong backs or diligent hands.

The antidote to the sin of self-importance is to draw the team into collaborating to assess, consider and decide how to resolve issues that arise in the daily flow of the business (Boyd Cycle) .

Consider the value of creating thought partnerships between and among your team members and associates. People need to understand each other’s roles as well as the part they are to play in executing your business plan.

In all of these situations and in countless other ways, the leader has to control personal feelings and act in ways that support the outcomes that workers individually, and the company as a whole, are working to create.

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