Letting Go of Pride « Wayne Hastings

If you want to be an effective leader, you must let go of some bad attitudes. Pride is the first one that needs to go.

Pride is pure selfishness. A proud leader’s mind is closed to new truths; he or she is unteachable. Pride causes inflexibility: “We will only pursue my ideas, thank you very much.” Pride resists change. Pride forces us to care more about status and prestige. Pride gets in the way of asking others for help.

Pride is a focus on us rather than the development of other people.Pride causes a destructive competition between our team members and us, and between their ideas and ours. Pride says, “I have to win.” As an old saying goes, “An egoist is a man whose self-importance makes his mind shrink while his head swells.”

The opposite of pride is humility. Humility is self-effacement rather than self-advertisement. It focuses our attention away from ourselves and onto other people and their development. It involves being flexible enough to listen and be taught by others. It means allowing people to generate new ideas and supporting those ideas even when they fail. It is the realization that the whole team, organization and/or business is not solely dependent on you.

Pride is a wall; humility is a gate.

Effective leaders build gates.