You Need an Ego to Survive Leadership. Just Don’t Let It Eat the Kids.
Uncorking leadership, learning, and the conversations that move schools forward.
Someone asked me recently what I’m afraid of.
Easy.
Sharks.
Actual sharks.
Ocean sharks.
Big teeth. Fins. Swimming around underneath you where you can’t see them.
Absolutely not.
People sometimes seem surprised by this because they’ve watched me navigate some pretty difficult leadership situations.
I’ve been told I’m brave.
Relentless.
That I’m willing to walk into conversations other people would rather avoid.
That I’ll take the heat.
That when things get hard, I don’t scare easily.
Okay. All true. But…
Have you seen a shark?
Leadership conflict?
Fine.
Great white shark?
I’m out. NOPE.
The question got me thinking about the sharks I’ve encountered in education.
And unfortunately, we have those too.
They just aren’t the people you might think.
You Actually Need an Ego to Do This Work
We talk about ego in leadership like it’s inherently bad.
I don’t think it is.
In fact, I think you need a reasonably healthy ego to survive education.
Because everyone has an opinion about how you should do your job.
Everyone.
People who haven’t taught a day in their lives will explain teaching.
People who have never led a school will explain how to lead one.
Someone will read one article and become an expert on literacy instruction.
Someone will visit a school for 45 minutes and diagnose everything wrong with it.
Parents will tell you what you’re getting wrong.
Teachers will tell you what you’re getting wrong.
Your boss will definitely tell you what you’re getting wrong.
The board may have thoughts.
The district has thoughts.
Politicians have thoughts.
Social media has so many thoughts.
And occasionally someone who has never met the children, teachers, families, or community you serve will explain exactly what everyone who works with them every day should have done.
Meanwhile, you still have to make the decision.
You have to walk back into the building.
You have to look people in the eye.
And tomorrow morning, kids are coming.
So yes.
You need an ego.
You need enough confidence to believe:
I know some things.
My experience matters.
I can make this decision.
I can withstand criticism.
I don’t need everyone to like me.
Without some ego, leadership will eat you alive.
The Ego Isn’t the Shark
This is where I’ve changed my thinking.
The problem isn’t having an ego.
The problem is forgetting who your ego is supposed to protect you from.
Sometimes that armor is necessary.
It helps you withstand the critics.
It lets you hold your ground when people question your judgment.
It gives you enough confidence to make the unpopular decision.
It keeps every criticism from becoming a crisis of identity.
That’s useful.
But armor gets dangerous when you forget to take it off.
Because the children in front of you aren’t the critics.
They aren’t the person who embarrassed you in a meeting.
They aren’t the employee who challenged your decision.
They aren’t the parent who sent the email.
They aren’t the person on social media who has decided they understand your school better than you do.
They’re kids.
And the minute protecting your reputation, your decision, your program, your initiative, your authority, or your need to be right becomes more important than what the kids who’s education you steward actually need—
you’re getting too close to the swimmers.
That’s the Shark
The sharks in education aren’t necessarily the loudest people.
They’re the people who can no longer tell the difference between protecting the work and protecting themselves.
The leader who keeps defending an initiative because it was their idea, even though the evidence says it isn’t working.
The person who won’t change a decision because changing it might look weak.
The expert who becomes more interested in proving their theory than finding out whether children are actually learning.
The leader who hears feedback as disrespect.
The person who needs credit more than they need progress.
The adult conflict that quietly becomes a student consequence.
That’s when ego stops being armor.
It becomes appetite.
And kids should never become collateral damage in an adult’s need to be right.
Sometimes the Bravest Sentence Is “I Was Wrong”
This is harder than it sounds.
Especially when you’ve fought for something.
Especially when people criticized you before you even had evidence.
Especially when changing course means one of those critics might say:
“See? I told you.”
Ugh.
There are few things more irritating.
But leadership cannot become a long-term experiment in proving your critics wrong.
The question has to remain:
What do the kids need?
Not:
How do I win this argument?
Not:
How do I prove my original decision was right?
Not:
How do I avoid looking inconsistent?
What do the kids need now?
Sometimes the evidence says stay the course.
Then stay.
Sometimes the evidence says adjust.
Adjust.
Sometimes the evidence says the thing you championed isn’t working.
Then kill your own darling.
That’s not weakness.
That’s the job.
Check Your Fin
You need enough ego to survive the critics and enough humility to survive yourself.
So I’ve started thinking there should be a leadership warning system.
A little imaginary fin that pops up whenever you find yourself saying:
“But I already told them…”
Fin.
“They’re going to think I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Fin.
“After everything I did to get this approved…”
Fin.
“I need them to understand that I was right.”
BIG FIN.
Those aren’t automatic signs that you’re making the wrong decision.
They’re signs that it’s time to check why you’re making it.
Ask:
Am I protecting kids?
Am I protecting the organization?
Am I protecting an important principle?
Or am I protecting me?
Sometimes the answer will still be:
I’m holding the line.
Good.
Hold it.
But know why.
Your Brain Would Also Really Like You to Be Right
There is actually research behind this tension.
Psychologists have long studied motivated reasoning—our tendency to process information in ways that protect what we already believe, want to believe, or have invested ourselves in.
Ziva Kunda’s foundational work on motivated reasoning found that people don’t always evaluate evidence like neutral judges. Our motivations can influence which evidence we seek, how carefully we scrutinize it, and which conclusions feel convincing.
Which is slightly inconvenient for those of us making leadership decisions.
Because the more publicly you’ve defended something, the harder it can become to evaluate new evidence about it without also evaluating yourself.
If this isn’t working, was I wrong?
If I change direction, will people think I failed?
What about everyone who told me this wouldn’t work?
And suddenly we’re no longer just studying whether the decision worked.
We’re defending our identity.
Research on intellectual humility offers the counterweight. Researchers describe it, in part, as recognizing that our beliefs and conclusions can be wrong and remaining open to evidence that challenges them.
That doesn’t mean becoming an uncertain leader.
It doesn’t mean abandoning your judgment every time someone criticizes you.
And it definitely doesn’t mean leadership by comment section.
It means having enough confidence to make the decision and enough humility to keep testing whether it was the right one.
That’s the balance.
Ego says: I can make this call.
Humility says: I might need to change it.
You need both.
Because when ego starts deciding which evidence you’re willing to hear?
Fin.
Final Sip
I am not particularly afraid of hard leadership situations.
Conflict doesn’t scare me much.
Criticism doesn’t scare me the way it used to.
Making an unpopular decision doesn’t either.
Twenty-plus years in education will build some armor.
And I am grateful for mine.
But I never want the armor I built to survive this work to become dangerous to the people I’m supposed to serve.
You need an ego to survive leadership.
Enough to withstand the critics.
Enough to trust your experience.
Enough to make the call.
Enough to get back up when people come for you.
Just keep checking where you’re swimming.
Because the critics are adults.
The kids aren’t.
And if your need to be right ever gets bigger than their need for you to get it right—
you’ve become the shark.
Ego can help a leader withstand criticism, but once being right becomes part of protecting identity, evidence becomes harder to hear.
And, as previously established:
I am afraid of sharks.
Sip Wisdom: Recommended Reading
Ziva Kunda — “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” (1990), Psychological Bulletin.
A foundational review explaining how motivation can influence the way people search for, evaluate, and interpret information. Particularly relevant when leaders become personally invested in a decision they have made or publicly defended.
Mark R. Leary et al. — “Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility” (2017), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Research examining intellectual humility as recognizing that one’s beliefs may be fallible. That’s the leadership muscle underneath the shark metaphor: conviction without assuming infallibility.
Amy C. Edmondson — Right Kind of Wrong (2023).
Edmondson’s work on intelligent failure and learning is useful here because effective leaders and organizations have to distinguish between defending standards and learning from evidence that something did not work as expected.
Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow & Marty Linsky — The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
Their distinction between technical and adaptive challenges is relevant to the criticism piece. Leadership often requires tolerating conflict, uncertainty, competing values, and resistance rather than interpreting resistance itself as proof that a decision is wrong—or right.