Jeff Dewing CEO of CloudFm and No1. best-selling business author and podcaster draws upon his business experience building a £70m business to offer four tips to stop ego getting in the way.

My first business went downhill because of ego and not to mention the fact that I got distracted by the excitement of running a football club. I ended up bankrupt and with just £7.60 in my account. Through these harsh life lessons, I quickly realised ego in business is unsustainable. Humility is the key to success and without it, you can only grow so far.

I started a new business from my garden shed, brushing my ego aside and putting humility at the fore. As a result, I grew this business to £70M in four years and it’s now projected to make £250M by 2026. Here are the lessons I learnt along the way and some top tips to prevent ego from getting the better of you.

1. You don’t know everything

Ego is the enemy. The book by the same name opens by arguing that “the type of people who tend to succeed early, tend to be the same kind of people who are in danger of ego taking the predominant voice in their actions.” From having grown up in humble beginnings to witnessing the rise and merciless fall of my first business, I can attest to this. Also, the research is there to prove it. In more than two-thirds of business failures, the presence of someone with a major personal ego contributes to its bad performance or collapse.

Although the incessant desire to attain knowledge is a typical trait of an entrepreneur, tasting success early on in life can fuel our ego which can blind us to our own faults and potentially prevent us from learning and developing. Never pass up on an opportunity to develop yourself and don't fall into the trap of thinking you know it all. Ego makes you overestimate your abilities. Doing so contributes to poor leadership as you’ll alienate others who know better. Whereas, admitting you don’t know everything gives you credibility as it shows self-awareness, a key trait that will take you to new levels of performance.

2. Hire people better than you

Face the facts, you simply cannot be the best at everything. You need to realise this in order to bring in the people you need to grow the business. It may be hard at first to ignore your ego when it questions why you are hiring people ‘better’ than you. You need to change your perspective and realise what you’re actually doing is hiring people who are experts in their field and able to provide strengths in areas where you have weaknesses.

Every leader should listen to differing opinions, but the ego wants to win and is triggered by outside voices, making it impossible to constructively move forward. This dysfunction trickles down to other colleagues and is equally destructive. Set your ego aside and admit when others know more than you. You never know, it might save your business.

The ego also enjoys playing the blame game when things go wrong. Resist this. You aren’t always going to be the hero of the story. A good leader is one who knows when to own up to their mistakes and has the humility to say, “I might have got that wrong.” It also creates a culture where employees hold themselves accountable too.

3. Put people first

It has been a whirlwind couple of years, with the pandemic disrupting our work patterns and social relationships, exacerbating anxiety, depression and a host of other mental health issues. Now we’re also amidst a cost-of-living crisis too and it’s more important than ever to put others first. The ego is selfish, irrational and impulsive. It can encourage you to chase numbers above all else, but those business targets won’t be achieved with an unhappy workforce.

Business should not simply be about balance sheets and job rates – it is about people. There are good people behind every great business. Investing in and looking after them delivers win-win outcomes. One of the ways we do this at Cloudfm is by focusing on well-being. As well as implementing mental health programmes and training, we regularly focus on building resilience. Each month we use a tool called the five strands of resilience – looking at mental, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual states. Employees write down how they are going to maintain those five things and share them with their colleagues.

Leadership is about caring for people and always trying to do the right thing. It is about empathy, not exploitation. If you live by this, more often than not your business will succeed as well.

4. Don’t seek to control, empower

The ego always seeks control. It hates the unfamiliar and feels assured in knowing exactly what is going on. This manifests itself in manipulating external conditions, such as employees’ working conditions/environment, to derive a semblance of control.

But with 42% of people believing their work environment is unhealthy and that their managers do not care about their well-being, it’s clear this is unsustainable. It’s important to realise there’s no such thing as work-life balance, there’s only life. Businesses should make it their priority to realise what’s truly important to employees and try to work around them, adapting to their needs as much as they possibly can.

Employers shouldn't force employees into an office just for the sake of it or use strict remote working monitoring/tracking tools to check and control their every move. You need to learn to trust your employees wholeheartedly unless they break that trust.

Ultimately, businesses need to realise they only thrive if the people behind them are thriving. For this to happen leaders need to not let their ego get the better of them and enable employees the autonomy to control their own destinies. Freedom is not the traditional nine-to-five nor a rigid expectation of “you must be here, and you must be there at a certain time”. Giving freedom empowers your employees to agree and collaborate to solve problems in the best way possible for both of you.