What You'll Take Away
◆ Confidence is great, but humility scales further, especially in cross-functional environments where nothing big happens alone.
◆ Big wins almost always rest on a chorus of collaborators you didn't directly manage and may never publicly thank.
◆ The "I" matters and your story is worth telling, but the "We" is what actually scales.
It's Tempting. And Sometimes You Should.
Let's get one thing straight before we go any further: advocating for yourself is not the problem. It's actually necessary. In a world where people are busy and attention is scarce, if you don't tell your story, don't expect someone else to do it for you.
So yes, own your wins. Talk about what you built. Put it on your resume, your LinkedIn, your year-end review. You earned it.
But there's a version of this that tips over into something else entirely. Something that starts to erode the very relationships that made those wins possible in the first place.
And I've seen it happen to smart, talented, well-intentioned people who just got a little too caught up in the narrative they were building about themselves.
Confidence is great. Humility is greater. And knowing the difference between the two is what separates good leaders from the ones people actually want to work for.
What Getting High on Your Own Supply Actually Looks Like
It doesn't usually show up as arrogance. That would be too easy to spot.
It shows up as someone who takes the meeting recap and writes themselves into the hero role without mentioning the three people who saved the pitch the night before. It's the leader who presents a strategy as fully formed when it was actually a rough idea that their team spent two weeks stress-testing and improving. It's the person who, when things go well, says "I" and when things go sideways, says "we."
People notice. They always do. And once they do, something shifts. They stop offering you their best thinking, because they've learned it won't get credited. They start protecting their own contribution instead of pooling it. The collaboration that made the win possible in the first place quietly disappears.
You can still have a great quarter. But you'll never know what you left on the table.
The Out of Phone Story
One of the clearest examples I have from my own career is launching the Out of Phone program at TikTok. My team incubated the idea. We shaped the early vision. I was proud of that, and I still am.
But here is the honest version of what actually happened: that launch doesn't exist without a legal team willing to sit with real ambiguity and find a path through it. It doesn't happen without a sales team that believed in the concept enough to put their relationships on the line for it. It doesn't happen without finance, without comms, without partners across the business who had their own priorities and still made room for ours.
Some of those people I managed directly. A lot of them I didn't. Some of them I barely spoke to in the day-to-day. But every single one of them had a hand in what we built.
When I talk about Out of Phone, I try to carry that. Not out of false modesty, but because it's the accurate version of the story. And the accurate version is actually more impressive, not less, because it says I was part of something that required that many people to believe in it.
The bigger the win looks from the outside, the more hands were probably involved on the inside. Let that be part of the story you tell.
The Balance Worth Finding
This isn't a call to shrink. It's not "be quiet and let other people take your credit." That's its own kind of problem.
It's more like this: tell your story, and make it big enough to include the people who actually belong in it. Talk about what you led and what you learned and what you built. And in the same breath, name the people who made it real with you. Not as a footnote. As part of the story itself.
"I led this" and "we pulled this off together" are not in conflict. The best leaders say both, and they mean both.
The "I" matters. Your story is worth telling. But the "We" is what actually scales.
The Lesson
Never get so caught up in your own wins that you forget the house you built, or the hands that helped you build it. The people in that house are watching. And they'll work harder for a leader who sees them than for one who doesn't.
Community Challenge
Ever had a win that looked like "yours" on paper but was really a team triumph? Drop a shoutout or story below. Let's normalize team credit in a world obsessed with individual achievement.
TEAM WIN / MY WIN
Dan Page