Lesson Seventeen: Ego is the enemy of esteem and esteem is the real brass ring
Stay humble and keep learning for learning's sake
This newsletter wraps up my initial 17 Lessons series. Thank you all for reading these. There is more coming!
In the latter part of my tenure at Dropbox, I returned to regular church goer status. For two decades, I only attended church for weddings and funerals and I certainly wasn’t open to the idea that I could receive even a modicum of enlightenment within the walls of a religious institution.
As my frustration about work began to bleed into the many facets of my life, and after a bit of a weird experience in a cemetery, I changed my mind. I began to speak with the pastor of the local Catholic Church and we struck up a bit of a friendship. After a few coffee discussions and a couple of walks it was clear that he could provide the type of insight into life that I was looking for and I dove back into church, attending Mass regularly at St. Augustine’s in Pleasanton, CA.
While I was raised mostly Catholic, at around the age of 11 my family stopped going to the Catholic Church in Lemoore and switched to an Episcopalian parish. The joke here is that all Catholics think Episcopalians are Protestants and all Protestants think Episcopalians are Catholic. As a result of this switch, I had really only completed three of the four “standard” Sacraments and I felt a real desire to complete the process of Confirmation (the other three being Baptism, Reconciliation and Eucharist).
Confirmation classes for adults are conducted in a weekly evening meeting called RCIA, Rites of Christian Initiation for Adults. I had a sponsor named Mike who helped me remember how to pray again, but most of the growth I experienced in this period of time was through the Monday evening sessions where a group of about 12 of us met with our Director, Matt.
All of this is really just to lead to the point that it was here that I started to really understand the difference between ego and esteem, and all of the lessons I had learned seemed to boil down to this difference. I was exposed to many of the historical figures that guided the development of the Church over the centuries in these discussions. One of my favorite Catholic thinkers is Thomas Aquinas.
The reason I love to read his thoughts on the world in the 1200’s is because you can take them out of the context of the era in which they were written and they have profound meaning to this day. I think some of this is because he was very fond of Aristotle and he married Gospel teachings with Classic Philosophy. His writing “Summa Theologiae” includes voluminous points about truth. God is the cause of all truth, according to Aquinas. I extend that further by saying “God is the truth and the truth is God.”
What does this all have to do with ego and esteem? One of my favorite concepts that Thomas Aquinas is noted for is the idea of the Four Substitutes for God. These substitutes are Power, Pleasure, Wealth and Glory. As I mentioned in an earlier lesson, ego is an addictive force. So too are these four substitutes for God.
If we take this in a secular direction, these four motivations are fuel for the ego, and the enemy of a humble truth. When we eschew the need to have these four factors fuel our self image, we are embracing esteem.
I think it is important to make the distinction that each one of these things is fine in and of itself. But let us think about two of them, power and wealth, and explore how they can derail a good thing when they become the focus.
The idea that you should seek power when it makes sense to have power is different than the idea that seeking power for power’s sake is destructive. If we break the idea of power down further we can understand this distinction much better.
The best description of power I have ever encountered is the French and Raven model for the Five Bases of Power. This was an idea that they published in 1959 and it explained the methods folks used to gain power. There were originally five: reward, coercion, legitimate, expert and referent. In 1965 Raven added informational power to bring the total to six.
Each of these bases can be used in positive and negative ways. Reward power is commonplace in the modern SIlicon Valley ecosystem, for example. All full time regular employees are compensated, in part, by equity grants. The idea is that you make more money in the long run by making decisions that help drive the long term growth of your employer's stock.
Coercion has a negative connotation in my mind because I associate it with the word “threat.” But it can be used in a healthy manner if a company has a truly transparent process for defining objectives and carrying out regular performance reviews. I know, I know... I hate performance reviews, too. But, in theory you can see that if a performance review process is truly fair and involves the input of the person being reviewed it is a powerful tool of coercion to get everyone in an organization on the same page and pushing toward meaningful outcomes for the company.
Legitimate power is the idea that someone has a role or position of power that they have been elected or appointed to. Your boss gets to tell you what to do because they are your boss. Now we talked at length earlier about what makes a good boss and just because they are the boss doesn’t always make them right. But you can also see that if your boss is a good one you trust them to develop a good way to make tough decisions and you know that this is part of their job.
Expert power is the idea that one gains power based on what they know, what they’ve experienced or because of special skills and talents. One who is seeking power for power’s sake might have a phony resume and may pretend to know something they don’t know in order to gain favor with those higher than they are in the org chart. We all know people like this and we have all seen folks get ahead through this kind of methodology.
Think about the people you have worked with in your life that were prone to doing these kinds of things. What sort of environment did their elevation bring to the workplace? Did it inspire the right kind of behaviors from everyone else? I can think of many incidents in my career where the ego of one team member won out and the organization suffered.
Referent power is one that I have almost always thought of in a positive light, though it can be used in a bad way. I think of referent power as almost the opposite of coercion. We all can think of times when we knew we were walking into a cluster of bad decisions and circumstances that had led to a crisis. When I think back on these types of situations in my career I am grateful that in most cases there was someone in the room that everyone else knew they could look to guide us to a good outcome. That person could have been the lowest level employee in the room at times but everyone in the room referred power to them because experience taught us that this person was the right person to make a decision.
Understanding the ways in which people can come to hold power is important. Understanding that you can boil down a positive or negative use of those methods by thinking of them as ego driven versus esteem driven is priceless. I am not arguing that the pursuit of power is bad in and of itself, only that people who seek power for power’s sake are misguided. When your time to be in a position of power comes, always ask yourself if what you are doing is about making you feel good at the expense of others and you will know the right way to proceed.
Similarly, I am not arguing that attaining wealth is a bad thing. Afterall, we all only show up to the office on a daily basis because we are trading our time for someone else’s money. However, when wealth is your primary motivator it can lead to some truly horrible displays of a lack of humanity that are destructive to the long term health of an organization. Not long after I left Facebook my family and I were on vacation and we went to visit a former coworker for dinner.
This coworker was a top performer at Facebook, a guy who I leaned on throughout the most terrible times of my personal life falling apart. He was an uncompromising sort who had seen me smoking cigarettes on one occasion and rightfully dressed me down verbally, “Don’t you want to see your children grow up?”
It was a moment that served as a turning point in my personal journey, if only for a short time. The point is, he was always motivated more by a job well done than by the monetary rewards for that job well done. Just before he left Facebook, for what I assumed was what we all referred to as “calling in rich” his boss suddenly was nowhere to be seen and an email was sent out letting us all know that his boss was no longer part of Facebook and that we should all refrain from speculating as to why or speaking with him.
While the point of us dining together was not to talk about that incident, the topic did come up and while the details of what happened are not something I have much insight into it, it was clear that my top performing teammate left Facebook because his boss had been using his authoritative power in an unethical way to extract wealth from my former teammate, his direct report. I asked my friend why he hadn’t let everyone know what had happened, why he wasn’t telling me all of the details, had he signed an NDA or something?
The answer was honorable if disconcerting on some level. He told me that he didn’t want to tell everyone what had happened because he realized that all of his friends' wealth was at stake and that if the bad actor was gone, and what had happened to him wouldn’t happen to anyone else, that was enough. He didn’t want to tarnish the Facebook brand in a way that could hurt the stock price because he was worried about how it would impact what we had all worked, at great personal costs, to build.
This quagmire of dishonesty and strange definition of what was honorable was born of the greed that my teammate’s boss had given himself over to. He was worshipping wealth and the boost to his own ego that came with other people knowing he had wealth resulted in a terrible situation for my friend, which should be bad enough. But looking back I could see the fractures that had developed between the team I worked on and the team my teammate worked on in a much clearer way.
An environment of back stabbing and passive aggressive tattling had become the norm for a while and I never understood why until this dinner. It was because one person in a place of authority had decided to use that authority for his personal profit. The tentacles of this terrible situation spread and resulted in the disintegration of two teams that had worked together to change the world. All because one guy decided his wealth driven ego boost was more important than his esteem and that of his colleagues.
The answer to all of these challenges is the same. Ego is the enemy of esteem and esteem is the real brass ring. When you hit rough patches with your teammates, your boss, your spouse or your friends and you don’t know how or why, chances are you are valuing your ego more than your esteem. All of these substitutes can serve as hard lessons in needing external validation to feel self worth, of relying on ego.
Or, they can serve as the chief lesson I have learned thus far on my journey through Silicon Valley. Essentially, esteem is driven by satisfaction with the self and no one but you can make that happen.