Without ego, you cannot become a leader. With too much ego, you don’t stay that way for long. Plea for a fair place — that of Aristotle.
It’s the last thing leaders want to talk about. And it is precisely the first that should rise to the surface in coaching. The ego is the most widespread, and most costly, blind spot in French organizations. Expensive for performance. Costly for departing talent. Costly for the health of the leader himself. And yet, it is also without ego that no business is created, develops, or survives in the face of headwinds.
Therein lies the paradox that it is time to face. Because not looking at it is exactly what condemns so many transformations to failure, and so many leaders to exhaustion.
The ego, this vital force
Without a healthy dose of ego, no one gets going. The ego of the leader is what allows him to believe before others believe it, to expose himself publicly, to make unpopular decisions, to look the market in the face when the market tells him no.
This is the launching phase, in the model of Frédéric Hudson: momentum, desire, passion, audacity. The vital force that transforms a project into a business. This ego is legitimate and necessary. To deny it would be to deny the creative power which is also the driving force of all entrepreneurship.
A leader without ego is a leader who doesn’t deliver. But watch out for tipping.
The shift: when the ally becomes the enemy
The problem is never the ego itself. This is his trajectory. The moment when ally becomes enemy is rarely spectacular. It is silent, progressive, almost imperceptible to those who experience it. It takes three main forms.
First form: the refusal to include oneself in the equation. A transformation is slipping? “It’s a question of communication!” or: “The strategy is good, it’s the execution that failed.” or again: “Those who hold back are afraid of change.” Three comfortable mental models — all of which have one thing in common: the leader’s vision floats above all criticism, while responsibility descends from floor to floor to those with the least power and least voice. No one, at any level, questions whether it is the project itself that is the problem — or the way in which it was designed and imposed.
Second form: overcontrol. The manager no longer delegates, or delegates poorly. He checks everything, takes everything back, no longer trusts. At the origin of this behavior, almost always, two drivers identified by transactional analysis: “Be strong”, which prevents you from asking for help, and “Be perfect”, which makes the imperfection of others unbearable. These restrictive messages, inherited from childhood and long useful, become powerful obstacles to collective growth at the head of a company.
Third form, the most subtle: misunderstanding of oneself. Leaders who have never looked into their emotions, their beliefs, their unconscious mechanisms end up constantly replaying them, in forms that surprise themselves. Repeated tensions at CODIR, inability to recruit above their own level, unexplained departures of talent, growing feeling of isolation, recurring conflicts with the co-founder or shareholder. Destiny, precisely.
The hidden cost: what the ego silently destroys
What I observe in the SMEs and ETI can be summed up in one sentence: where the ego of the manager has taken up too much space, collective intelligence dies out.
The best people stop offering. Talents shut up and then leave. The CODIRs become echo chambers where we agree more than we contradict. And the business, including its growth, ends up depending exclusively on the energy of one person. It is no longer an organization. It’s an extended solo.
According to Gallup (2025), only 8% of French employees say they are truly committed to their company. The lowest rate ofEuropefor the fifth consecutive year. If the ego of the leaders does not alone explain this figure, no country in Europe will redress it until its leaders have taken seriously the question of their rightful place. And that this work is never undertaken because it touches on the only taboo that leaders still share: their own fragility.
The right place to find for the leader: the way of Aristotle
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, speaks of the “golden mean”: virtue is neither excess nor deficiency, it is this fine tension between the two. For the leader, the ego happy medium looks like this.
On the one hand, audacity: without it, nothing is created. On the other, humility: without it, nothing is transmitted. At the center, the ability to know yourself well enough to not let yourself be led by your gray areas, and to leave enough space for others to take theirs.
This right place is worked on two complementary levels.
When the event depends on the leader. A project, a strategy, a reorganization: it’s about methodically framing the action in four questions: Where am I really? What do I really want? Why and for what do I want this? How do I go about it concretely, starting tomorrow? This OQPC method (“The leadership of oneself, for Sapiens in search of meaning) is the grammar of all conscious decisions. It prevents the manager from confusing activity and advancementenergy and results.
When the event does not depend on the leader. A takeover, a crisis, the departure of talent, new regulations, AI, a pandemic: the answer is completely different. Three words: welcome, accept, act. Not in this order by chance. To skip a step is to derail everything that follows: to decide too quickly before having accepted is to decide from anger or fear; to act before having welcomed is to act from denial. Everything that is not expressed is printed, we write in therapy. This also applies to strategy.
At a time when AI is transforming organizations and talents are seeking more meaning, managers can no longer just impose a vision: they must embody it. Those who succeed over the long term are often those who agree to question themselves, to no longer think alone and to look lucidly at their own functioning. Because true leadership begins there: in the ability to distinguish the ego that advances from the one that restricts. The transformation of the company then involves another transformation, even more demanding: that of the manager himself. So the real question is no longer: “Is my business ready to change?” but: “Am I ready to transform myself to lead others?”
