6. Ego is the Team Killer

We are conditioned to be heroes, but teams are where the magic happens.

Leave Your Ego at the Door

This isn’t about slogans. It’s about what makes shared ownership possible.

Ego is the team killer. Which is why retrospectives are so important to any team trying to accomplish something great! They give the team a ritual in which ego is left at the door, and a dialogue can take place without personal defenses partitioned around each member’s space. The team can discuss what is working, what is not working, what needs to stop, what needs to continue, and what needs to start. It is where mistakes can be corrected without malicious motivation, where juniors can learn from everyone’s mistakes and not just their own.

A team that can fail together, learn together, and train together will ultimately win together. A hero has to be perfect, and perfect is only possible when you control every aspect of the process. Why are heroes bad? Because they end up trying to control everything, which limits the potential of the team.

Egotistical leaders create lists for their team. They don’t see any other way but their own and drive the team to deliver what they already believe should exist.

They never lose. They only win.

If the product is successful, if the launch is on time, if the experience is intuitive, they pat themselves on the back for leading well. In executive meetings, they take full credit, using possessive language: I delivered, my team shipped, my roadmap.

If the product fails, if the launch is delayed, if the experience is confusing, they blame the team. Blame the execution. Give poor year‑end reviews. Create distance. If only we had more people, better people, then we could have delivered what I saw in my head.

Ego doesn’t allow failure, and what cannot fail cannot learn.

Heroes die on hills. Teams take them.

Heroics might solve a short‑term crisis, but they don’t scale. Martyrdom, left unchecked, begins to erode the very trust it pretends to uphold. The best teams I’ve worked with weren’t driven by individual brilliance alone, but by a steady, collaborative effort—one shaped by a shared understanding of what we were trying to build, and why it mattered.

The hardest part of any organizational transformation is moving from a hero‑culture to a team‑culture.

What Do I Mean?

If you’ve ever been in a hero culture, it values and rewards the individual who hoards knowledge, tools, and processes to ensure no one else can do the job but themself. A hero would rather take the hill by themselves, hold it, and assert their KOM status. This is toxic to any team trying to accomplish something great, fun, or even novel.

Hero culture is seductive because it looks like devotion. The late nights, the last‑minute saves, the moments when one person steps in and pulls the whole thing across the finish line—it can feel like proof of commitment, a badge of honor. But it’s not sustainable, and worse, it’s often performative. When knowledge is hoarded and the process is obscured, the rest of the team becomes dependent on the person who “knows how to get it done.” The organization starts rewarding those who burn out instead of those who build systems that others can thrive within.

Team culture takes longer to notice. It is quieter, more subtle in implementation. These types of teams have leads who can execute and teach. They make space for the naive question and don’t condemn ignorance. These teams leave a margin in the process for others to learn and grow. They don’t provide solutions to the questions they know the answer to, but coax the team to find it on their own—nudging when the team is close, praising when the team solves it. This style is for sure slower in the short term, but it compounds as empowerment often creates curious and motivated team members, who have ownership in the outcomes.

When something breaks, the whole thing doesn’t fall apart, because no one person is the bottleneck or the savior.

Hero culture survives on applause.

Team culture survives on trust.

We’re always building trust—or eroding it.

With customers, each other, and ourselves. Every commit, every conversation, every launch is a vote. Not for perfection, but for credibility, clarity, and consistency. Trust doesn’t show up in the metrics until it’s gone. You can’t A/B test your way into it; you earn it in the small, mostly invisible decisions. You should build your teams and your products like it’s your most important asset. Because it is.

A team, with individuals working on the hills they have conquered, will only be able to work linearly; A + B = C.

Whereas a team of individuals working in tandem is a multiplier; A × B × C = XYZ.

And trust is what makes the multiplier possible. Not trust as sentiment, but as an action. The best teams have confidence that their teammate will follow through, will tell the truth, and will stay until it is finished.

Have you ever done a trust fall? Would you trust your current team to catch you?

The product, then, is the team. A team without ego, with vision and direction, delivering features and products that matter. When the team is building trust, the culture becomes a self‑propelling engine, creating waves because they are progressing and moving towards the goals they set.

Trust is an engine.

Trust allows a team to move without extra friction. Seamless transitions and handoffs without any malice or gotchas. Trusting teams don’t hesitate to raise alarms, to speak their mind, to give advice, or voice caution. Teams that trust each other spend less time positioning, posturing, or protecting their turf. They aren’t territorial. They don’t need layers of process to compensate for a lack of empowerment or to feign control.

Trust also allows for contradiction. For uncertainty. For the honest “I don’t know” that so often precedes real insight. When a team is afraid to say what’s not working, nothing gets better. But when there’s trust, critique becomes a form of care. Feedback sharpens rather than shames. Ownership is shared, not siloed.

When trust is built over time, the team becomes more than the sum of its parts. Communication gets easier, and collaboration gets faster. From the outside, it can look effortless.

But it isn’t.

It’s just embedded.

If you aren’t doing any of these things, the risk is that your customer sees it, their trust in your company or your product begins to erode, and when your team is faced with the obstacle to overcome the downturn, it finds itself at the edge of the precipice.

The team can either step into trust and deliver a bridge spanning the gap, or it could crumble under the pressure of pointed fingers and self‑protection.

Building trust is a constant vigilance against the erosion of relationships. It’s counterintuitive, as many think trust is a matter of control, but holding things tighter doesn’t allow for growth. It constricts. It stifles. Whereas a culture of trust allows for growth through empowerment—by letting go, you get more.

It gives room for people to change their minds, to bring something unfinished, to say what they’re seeing without fear. It takes patience to let go, to listen longer than you want, and to understand each perspective. A team that can work through being uncomfortable, that doesn’t crumble under pressure, but performs is a team that can build almost anything.