There's a question that undoes almost any honest executive: of the last five important decisions you made, how many passed, even for a second, through the filter of how does this leave me looking?
It's fine if the answer is «all of them». The ego isn't the enemy; it got you here. Ambition, the need to prove yourself, the hunger for recognition: career fuel. The problem starts when the fuel does the driving.
Leading without ego is serving something bigger than your own image: the need for personal credit weighing less than the need to create results that serve a common good. It's one of those competencies that can't be faked for long. A team can smell from a distance whether you work for the project or for your photo with the project.
What covers it is egoic ambition and the need to look good: the right decision you don't make because it makes you look bad to the board, someone else's merit that ends up with your name on it, the room you dominate because staying quiet feels like losing. None of this makes you a bad person. It makes you human, with an old script: I am worth what can be seen of me.
But you have the exception too. Remember a time you pushed something through knowing the credit would go to someone else, or defended an unpopular decision that cost you part of your image and was right. Do you remember the feeling afterwards? It usually has a solidity that no applause provides.
The small experiment: this week, give away a piece of credit. A real one, in public, with a first and last name, without mentioning yourself. And watch two things: what happens to the other person, and what happens to you. The second one is the measure of how much work remains.
When this competency grows, something curious happens to your power. It increases. People align with you not because of your title, but because it's clear you're not in it for yourself. That is the authority no reorganisation can take away.
This isn't about me. The day that sentence is descriptive rather than aspirational, you'll be leading something else: something bigger than you.