Leaders often are, by definition, confident people who have, on balance, realized successes throughout their professional careers.  One needs to be careful that this confidence doesn’t morph into cockiness – or just as bad – the appearance of cockiness to those around you.  This is particularly important as you take on a new challenge in a new environment.  All too often as you enter a new environment, you really don’t know what you don’t know, and if you don’t understand that, you could easily trip over your ego before you are out of the starting gate.

One of the worst things a new leader can do is not appropriately demonstrate their respect for the new environment they are in.   You need to let go of your past and avoid using the successes of your previous experiences as a vehicle to try to show folks in your new environment how good you are and what a great leader you are – or are going to be.  Yes, yes – those credentials are what helped you get the job, but now that you are ‘on the ground’ no one cares about how ‘you did it at Cornell’. They want to know how you are going to ‘do it’ at your new institution.  It is important that you leave your successes of the past at the doorstep of you new environment and make the visible effort to learn about your new environment.

A key part of all of this is how you manage your ego.  Having an ego is not bad.  In fact, I would suggest that everyone who is good enough to sit in a leadership position in a profession as challenging as IT has, by definition, an ego.  The key issue is – how you manage your ego – how you live with it.  Great leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great organization.  It isn’t that they don’t have an ego – or self interest.  They all do!  And they all are ambitious!!  But their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, for the organization, not for themselves. 

A good practice to follow in managing your ego is to never believe your press clippings – good or bad.  There will be times when you will wake up in the morning and find that some reporter has gotten their teeth into an issue where they may – or may not – have the facts or the issues straight – and you find yourself the subject of debate in the local paper that is attemping to demonstrate to the entire community what you ‘don’t know’.  Having been vilified myself over an issue that was totally misconstrued by the local phone company to a sympathetic press, I quickly learned not to take such attacks too seriously and not at all personally.  It is also important to balance this ‘disconnected disinterest’ with those times that the local press (or more likely the PR arm of your university) after some reasonable success story casts you as the greatest thing to come along since their last Nobel Prize winner.   It is really unlikely that any of these sources really know what you know – and what you don’t know.

While some of the focus on my note is to leaders in new environments, the lessons are really applicable to all.  Regardless of what leadership role you play and regardless of how long you have been playing that role in your organization, you really can’t ‘know it all’ – and you shouldn’t be ashamed to admit it.  In the end, great leaders understand that it isn’t all about them – and that even if they are the key to the success of the organization, the contributions of others need to be realized and recognized.  This will come easily to you If you really accept the fact that ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’.