Why Your Company Stopped Growing (And Ego Is to Blame)

The following is adapted from Win or Win by Tamika Tyson.

I once worked with a Founder who had a senior project manager named David. David had been with him for eleven years. He was there when they won their first municipal contract, there when they nearly went bankrupt, there for every late night and every close call.

By year eleven, David was in over his head. The projects had grown bigger, the clients more demanding. His instincts had worked beautifully when the firm was a ten-person shop. Now they were sixty people, and his projects ran consistently over budget. His teams complained about unclear direction.

The Founder knew. He had heard the complaints. But every time he pictured the conversation, he saw David working until midnight on the proposal that once saved the company. So he never had the talk. Instead, he quietly routed the biggest projects to other people and hired a "deputy" for David who was really a babysitter. He told himself he was protecting David. He was protecting himself.

A year later, David closed the office door and said, "I'm not stupid. I know what you've been doing." He resigned that week.

The Founder called me the next day, gutted. "I was trying to be loyal," he said.

"You were trying to avoid a hard conversation," I told him. "That's not loyalty. That's ego."

Most people think ego means arrogance. Sometimes it means avoidance. The truth most leaders don't want to hear is that misalignment doesn't come first. Ego does. It is often the worm at the center of the apple. Failing to scale is not a strategy problem or a talent problem. It is an ego problem.

Ego is like carbon monoxide: colorless, odorless, and deadly. In business it doesn't kill you in minutes. It quietly drains the oxygen from the room until one day you realize you're suffocating.

Don't get me wrong. Ego isn't all bad. You need it to leave a comfortable job, to keep going when everyone says no, to make bold moves your competitors won't. But there is a tipping point. Small doses give you assertiveness. Large doses trample everyone, including your own team.

So when I meet a leadership team, I ask one question: Are you optimizing for Return on Investment or Return on Ego? ROI measures actual value created. Return on Ego chases perceived value, the feeling of being right, important, in control. Here's the simpler version. When someone disagrees with you, what's your gut reaction? If it's "they don't understand," that's ego. If it's "What am I missing?" that's ROI.

Ego can drive success, until it doesn't. Then you hit a revenue number and nothing moves you past it. Every team reaches an inflection point where they must choose to optimize for ego or for growth. The companies that scale choose growth.

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For more advice on leading your team past the ego traps that stall growth, you can find Win or Win on Amazon.

Tamika Tyson is a co-founder of TGC Impact Growth Fund/the Capital Collective and the founder of SCALE, a strategic consulting firm dedicated to helping business owners break through barriers, scale companies, and maximize value for sustainable growth or successful exits. Before founding SCALE, she was a global risk executive responsible for managing a portfolio of over a billion dollars. She led strategic business initiatives and credit risk strategies supporting complex global transactions, particularly in the energy and credit markets. Over a twenty-five-year career, Tamika has helped organizations navigate growth, transformation, and risk across industries, including energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and business services.