VER-XIV-0034
“I handed the credit to my team and watched them grow into it.”
You could have stood in the spotlight alone. You pointed it at them instead, and they rose to meet the trust. That is the difference between using people and building with them. Keep doing it. A leader who feeds people credit grows people; one who hoards it grows only a reputation.
Your Practice
- Name each person's real contribution, specifically, where it counts, to their faces and up the chain.
- Resist the pull to reclaim the story when it gets praised. Let it stay theirs.
- Hand the next visible win to someone ready to grow into it.
- Measure yourself by who you grew, not by how big your name got.
The Architects
“We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.”
Norbert Wiener, 'The Machine Age' (unpublished 1949 essay drafted for The New York Times; MIT Institute Archives), excerpted by John Markoff, NYT, May 20, 2013