An excessive need to be me!

It’s important to put your ego and interests aside and ensure you are doing right by your team or customers. Lynne Lloyd explains how.

Much earlier in my career I suffered from an acute case of “an excessive need to be me!”

This is the term that Marshall Goldsmith uses for people who blurt out their thoughts, feelings and personality in full and in front of others at work.

Typically, the sufferer rationalises their behaviour as, “This is who I am; I have to be me, take it or leave it.”  Fortunately I was provided with a cure for this career-limiting behaviour by my two managers who helped me to see how I could do things differently and coached me through the necessary changes.

A major personal insight was to modify what I said, when and how in order to gain the best responses and results from other people. So instead of thinking “I’m right about this,” and getting on my high horse and charging into the fray, it was to stop and think about what was the best way to let him/her know about the situation and gain their active cooperation to solve the problem as far as was possible.

Naively I used to think that acting in the interests of the team member or customer was all that mattered. Gradually I came to admit that being right would not help if I went about fixing things in the wrong ways. I came around to realising that my ego and my interests had to be placed into context with others who equally had their own points of view and interests.

Believing that “we are in the right” and we are not being well treated because of the culture, process, our manager, the human resources department is not going to hand us the solution.  What does matter is that we develop high self-awareness of our interpersonal behaviours and we manage them proactively and perceptively at all times.  Even one incident of “going over the top” will be remembered because anything negative and risky generally sticks to others’ perceptions of our competence for a long time.

Do I notice managers and professionals whose behaviours demonstrate “an excessive need to be me?” Yes, I do, all the time. Sometimes I have the opportunity to speak with them personally (and I hope sensitively) about the paramount importance of managing others’ perceptions and building the so-important relationships that will open up opportunities for advancement in their careers.

Since we started it in 2010, one of the reasons managers and professionals have found the Executive Presence workshop so useful is that it covers managing others’ perceptions as an essential precursor to building executive presence.

Our next Executive Presence Half-Day workshop is on Thursday 10th October 2013 in Brisbane.  Limited places are available. Click here for details and how to book.

Lynne Lloyd is managing director of People Results, a leading provider of executive coaching, mentoring and talent development workshops for clients throughout Australia.  People Results programs enable managers and executives to reach their full potential, to meet all the benchmarks of successful leadership and to deliver the desired results for their team and organisation.