Your Ego has an enormous impact on your sense of purpose and culture. In moments of crisis or challenge, we often feel our success threatened in some way, or we feel threatened by the conflict with the other person. These situations tend to bring out our coping strategies and our reactive behaviors. These reactive behaviors tend to ricochet off each other like a pinball machine and start to kill culture.

Shayne Hughes has taught leadership at the University of California Haas School of Business, the University of Michigan's Executive MBA Program and the Darden School of Business. His work has also appeared in Harvard's Du Bois Review, Forbes.com, NPR, Psychology Today and Diversity Executive Magazine.