Your Team’s Not Dysfunctional—Their Egos Just Aren’t Aligned

You hired A-players. So why are you still carrying the team?

Until you Blend Egos, you'll keep dragging the business uphill—and leaving profits on the table. 

In this episode, Dr. Dave breaks down the silent killer behind slow meetings, shallow buy-in, and stalled execution: ego friction.
You’ll learn how to align your team, speak a new cultural language, and turn solo performers into a synchronized force. 

What You’ll Learn: 

• Spot the Silent Killers: The subtle ego cues draining energy, speed, and ownership. 
• Flip the Language: How “I did” becomes “we built”—and why that changes everything. 
• Trigger Group Flow: Use equal input to unlock faster decisions, deeper trust, and compounding momentum. 

✅ Listen now—because misaligned egos don’t fix themselves.

Ready to install the 90-day system behind Flow-Driven success?
Book a complimentary Strategy Session with Dr. Dave to explore the Flow-Driven Profits Method and see if you're a fit.

👉 Only for entrepreneurs who care deeply about performance and people.

Transcript

William Seward wasn't just any politician. He was the politician, a polished statesman from New York, the Republican Party's front runner in 1860 the man everyone expected to become president. Then he lost to Abraham Lincoln, a lanky, self taught lawyer from the Illinois frontier, a man Seward and his political allies had publicly mocked as a backwards bumpkin, a lightweight. So when Lincoln won the nomination and then the presidency, Seward was stunned. He was humiliated. He returned home bitter and quiet, and then a letter arrived. It was from Lincoln, and it said, I would be honored if you would serve as Secretary of State. Imagine opening that envelope, reading those words from a man you dismissed, the man you tried to defeat, and now he's asking you to serve by his side. This wasn't politics that was courageous communication, a message that said, this isn't about ego. This is about the mission. Lincoln didn't posture, he didn't isolate, he invited and in doing so, he didn't just build a cabinet. He blended egos and that team, the so called Team of Rivals, would go on to help preserve the Union and transform the future of the country. And that brings us to today's conversation, because courageous communication isn't about being blunt or bold. It's about being bigger than your pride. It's the first step to dissolving ego friction, building trust and unlocking the deepest level of team performance, group flow. So here's the question I want you to consider, is your communication, blending egos or protecting them. Today, we'll talk about the language, the leadership and the culture that transforms isolated brilliance into shared genius. Let's get started. You went into business for freedom, and now you're the one holding it all together, every decision, every fire, every damn day, your team's smart, but they're not locked in, busy, but not bought in. And you feel it. That's not a leadership problem. It's a systems problem. You're still using Industrial Age management methods built for compliance, not creativity, for control, not trust, for output, not genius. We call it the burnout business model. And it's not just killing energy, momentum and morale. It's quietly sabotaging your future. And every day you stay stuck in that model is a day that you fall behind. But there's a better way. Flow is your most profitable state. You feel your best. You produce up to five times more, and when your whole team enters that state together, that's group flow, where ownership deepens, innovation compounds and culture becomes your competitive advantage. I'm your host and coach, Dr Dave Maloley, and this podcast will show you how to escape the grind, unleash your team's genius and build a business that scales with sanity, because in the age of AI, you can't outwork the machines, but you can out human them. This is flow driven. Let's build what's next. Here's the truth that most leaders miss you don't get high performance from a team by managing behavior. You get it by managing energy. And the biggest drain on your team's energy is unblended egos. When everyone's trying to prove themselves, protect themselves, or perform for credit, that creates a huge amount of friction, and it doesn't usually look like conflict. Sometimes it looks like silence, that shallow agreement, the slow decisions, the low ownership. That's ego fragmentation, and it's invisible until you realize your team's smartest people have stopped contributing. The antidote isn't better systems. It's a better signal, one that tells the whole team. This isn't about being right. It's about moving forward together. Let's define what we're really after here. Here, blending egos doesn't mean erasing personality. It means channeling ambition into alignment. It means each individual keeps their identity but redirects their energy towards a shared mission. That shift that's the entry point for group flow, and it will only happen when you have a few culture levers in place. Today, I'll walk you through three that matter most. One is language. Two is safety and three is shared input. First Language signals identity. Every culture has a code, and the first line of that code is the words that people use. If your team's default language is, I did my part, or I don't want to step on any toes, or I think this is right, but you don't have a team, you have a group of independent contributors trying not to get burned. But when you start hearing let's build this together. What are we missing? Here's how we improve this. That's identity forming in real time. These words aren't fluff. These words are infrastructure. They either create separation or unity. So listen for I versus we. Listen for ownership versus distance, and model the language that you want echoed your culture becomes the language that you tolerate. Secondly, safety enables surrender. People don't drop their ego unless they feel safe. So what does that mean? They feel safe to challenge. They feel safe to be wrong. They feel safe to be seen without posturing and positioning, you can't create flow in a room full of armor. The research backs this up. Google's project Aristotle found the top performing teams had one thing in common, not IQ, not experience. It was psychological safety and not fake safety, not we're all nice to each other. Safety, real safety, the kind that says, if you tell the truth here, even if it's messy, you won't be punished. You'll be respected. This is how trust becomes structural, not situational. So if you want your team to blend egos and share genius, start rewarding honesty more than accuracy. Three, equal input builds shared ownership. I want to say that again, equal input builds shared ownership in most companies. 80% of the conversation comes from 20% of the people. But that's not collaboration. That's conversational inequality. If you want everyone to own their outcome, you have to give everyone a way in MIT's Human Dynamics Lab studied this, they found that high performing teams had one consistent trait, equal turn taking, not just in meetings, across decision cycles, brainstorming and reflection. When you design for equal input, you reduce blind spots, you multiply insight, and most importantly, you reduce all of that ego drag, because now the idea isn't mine, it's ours. No one's defending, everyone's contributing. That's how ego gets absorbed into the mission. So here's what I covered so far. Blended egos beat isolated brilliance. They create energy instead of friction. They unlock flow instead of stalling in drama and gossip, and they transform a group of high performers into a high performance team. But that's not going to happen by accident. You need language that reinforces unity. You need safety that invites honesty, and you need structures that guarantee contribution. When those three are in place, ego stops being a barrier and it becomes a channel, not something to manage, but something to align. And that's where the real magic happens in your business. You know when you've blended egos, when wins feel shared, mistakes become solutions and momentum, and no one's holding back when. What they really think. It's no longer about who's right. It's about what's true. No one's guarding their turf. Everyone's rowing in the same direction. And when that shift happens, you don't have to force collaboration. It becomes the cultural default setting. That's the unlock, because you don't scale a business by adding more effort. You scale it by removing the friction between talented people. And the biggest source of friction is the part that nobody wants to talk about ego. So your job say the thing. Model this shift design for unity and let your business become the place where group flow isn't rare, it's normal. Before we wrap up today, here's my coaching challenge for you. In the next 24 hours, say one thing you've been holding back, not to provoke, not to posture, not to stir the pot, but to serve the mission, say the thing that clears the air, the thing that builds trust, the thing that blends ego, and then watch what happens next, because one moment of courageous communication can realign an entire culture. If you're the leader, go first. That's how you become the kind of person people trust with the truth. That's how your team starts to blend, and that's how your business enters flow. Thanks for joining me today. I sure appreciate you. If you found value in this episode, I'm gonna ask you to take a moment right now and pay a small fee, no, actually two small fees. The first one would be, share this episode with an entrepreneurial friend that would benefit from it, and secondly, leave a five star review. Those two actions help with the continued rapid growth of flow driven and until next week. This is Dr Dave reminding you to stay focused and flow driven you.