In India, we treat leadership the way we treat wedding guests: the more people hanging around to feed your ego, the more important you must be.
The Ego Equation is simple: Power + Applause – Answerability = Inflated Human Balloon.
In theory, leadership is about service. In practice, it often resembles a group project where one person signs the report and everyone else does the work. The moment someone acquires a title, their WhatsApp typing speed slows by 40%. They will scribble something in shorthand like ‘Seen’ or ‘Do the needful’. This is known as “executive latency,” a side effect of believing your thoughts must mature like exotic mango pickle before being shared.
Indian offices have perfected vertical yoga: everyone bends. Subordinates bend downward, superiors bend reality. Feedback travels up the hierarchy only after being filtered and occasionally fictionalised. By the time it reaches the top, even a crisis looks like “minor alignment issues”.
But here’s the paradox: the higher you rise, the thinner the oxygen of honesty. Without deliberate discipline, leaders confuse obedience with respect and silence with agreement.
Every leader claims to be mission-driven. Few admit to being ego-driven. Yet the two are close relatives. Ambition wants to achieve; ego wants to be seen achieving. One builds institutions. The other builds personality.
In moderation, ego is not only useful—it is necessary. Leadership demands a certain audacity: the willingness to take responsibility when outcomes are uncertain, to stand firm when consensus is absent, and to persist when criticism is loud. Without a strong sense of self, few would accept the loneliness of consequential decision-making.
The problem is not ego’s presence. It is its expansion. In the early stages of enterprise, leaders are often anchored by reality. Constraints impose humility. Markets are unforgiving teachers. Teams are small enough to offer unfiltered feedback. Success, when it comes, feels collective. As organisations scale, however, authority increases, access narrows, and deference grows. Information begins to travel upward carefully packaged, and disagreement is before delivery. Over time, the leader is exposed less to friction and more to affirmation.
Power alters conversational chemistry. When a leader’s opinion consistently prevails, others gradually stop offering alternatives out of futility. As authority rises, candour falls—unless consciously protected. Ego thrives in such environments. It quietly edits the narrative of success: the roles of luck, timing, mentors, and teams begin to fade from memory. What remains is a compelling story of personal brilliance. The leader starts to conflate “I lead this organisation” with “I am this organisation.”
Yet institutions, unlike individuals, are designed to endure. Leadership is custodianship, not ownership—at least not in the psychological sense. The most stable organisations are those where the leader understands that authority is temporary, but institutional credibility is cumulative.
Balanced ego strengthens leadership. It provides resilience, enables difficult calls, and absorbs criticism without collapsing. But unexamined ego gradually converts authority into entitlement. The leader begins to expect alignment. The consequences are rarely immediate. Organisations do not implode overnight. Instead, they lose the capacity to surprise themselves. Innovation requires dissent. Strategy requires competing ideas. When disagreement disappears, so does intellectual vitality.
The antidote is not self-effacement. Leadership is not an exercise in modesty, but of proportion. Humility is frequently misunderstood as soft-spokenness. In reality, humility is perspective. It is the recognition that success is co-created. That teams often compensate for leaders’ blind spots.
Self-observation becomes critical at higher levels of power. Leaders must ask themselves difficult questions: Am I defending this idea because it is strategically sound or because it is mine? Am I resisting a proposal because it is flawed or because it dilutes my control? Such introspection requires structured interruption. At senior levels, interruption does not occur naturally. Subordinates hesitate. Peers may defer.
Healthy leaders therefore design friction into their systems. They encourage dissent in boardrooms. They create psychological safety in teams. They speak last in discussions. They reward those who challenge constructively. Equally important is the cultivation of lightness; humour about one’s own importance is an underrated leadership discipline. Ego, in essence, is energy. Without it, organisations drift. With too much of it, they scorch.
In fast-scaling enterprises and legacy institutions alike, this balance becomes decisive. The traits that enable disruption—conviction, speed—must be tempered by reflection as complexity increases. What works in a small team may destabilise a large one. The evolution of leadership demands the evolution of ego.
Power does not corrupt automatically; it magnifies whatever sits within the leader. The corner office is less a throne and more a mirror. It reflects the leader’s internal architecture across the organisation.
I am reminded of a conversation with a senior corporate leader who was preparing to step down after a long tenure. I asked him what had changed most in his understanding of power. He paused and said, “In my early years, I walked into a room and expected everyone to listen. In my later years, I walked into a room and asked myself—have I listened enough?”
Ultimately, the business of life—and leadership—is about proportion. To take decisive calls, yet remain open to revision. To build legacy without becoming larger than the institution. When leaders remember titles are temporary but institutions endure, ego becomes an ally rather than an adversary. And perhaps that is the quiet art at the heart of leadership: to hold power firmly, but hold oneself lightly.
Debashis Chatterjee is Director, IIM Kozhikode and the author of 1 Minute Wisdom.
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