Five years ago, I was called in by the Board of a regional commercial bank for an emergency strategy review. Performance was down, customer satisfaction scores had tanked, the CEO insisted it was a systems issue and the COO blamed the branch network. The CHRO said staff morale was the problem. But no one, not one, dared say what I discovered in week one: the executive team was protecting their own egos instead of solving real problems.
You see, they were all smart people, well-educated, polished, respected in the industry. But during meetings, whenever one leader presented a suggestion, others would either keep quiet or nod passively, even when they disagreed. Why? Because dissent was seen as disloyalty. Challenging the CEO was career suicide. Asking “why are we doing this?” was branded as being negative. So everyone played along until the business hit the wall.
I told the Board bluntly: Your strategy isn’t broken but your culture is.
Strategy dies where egos thrive
If you grew in the village like myself, you know that when elders gathered to solve a community issue say, digging a new drainage canal. if one of them refused to get their hands dirty or insisted their idea was always best, the whole process would stall. We could spend more time massaging feelings than moving stones.The same thing happens in corporate boardrooms.
A strategy that requires innovation cannot survive in a space where people are more concerned with how they look than what works. When leaders spend more time defending their departments than challenging assumptions, the company plateaus. Or worse, it declines slowly while everyone smiles.
Protecting people is noble. Protecting egos is not.
In one transformation project, we faced a major roadblock: one senior executive was clearly not delivering. But the CEO was hesitant to act. “He has been with us since the beginning. Loyal guy,” the CEO said.
I understood the sentiment but reminded him: loyalty to the business must come before loyalty to personalities. The executive was eventually reassigned to a less central role, and a younger, sharper leader took charge. Within six months, churn dropped, and customer retention improved by 30%. Strategy wins when results not egos lead decisions.
Leadership challenge: build a culture of challenge
Here’s your assignment this week as a senior leader: ask your direct reports to anonymously answer this question:
“What’s one thing we are doing that no longer makes sense but no one wants to talk about?”
Then go a step further: review the responses in your next EXCO. Debate them openly. Do not defend or explore. If you start defending yourself immediately after feedback, you are training your team to lie to you.
The best strategy execution cultures I have seen are not polite, they are brutally honest. They argue, they debate, but they leave the room aligned.
Leadership tool: The Ego Audit
Run an internal 360 feedback for all senior leaders yourself included. But add one critical question:
“What do I do, say, or avoid that makes it harder for you to tell me the truth?”
The answers will sting but they will save your strategy.
If you want to scale your impact and build a future-ready enterprise, you must make it unsafe for egos to hijack the mission. Protect your people, not their pride.
Until next Tuesday,
