The Curtain

I told myself I didn't care who got the credit. Then someone reminded me my team did.

“I don’t care who gets the credit,” I said.

“Your team cares,” she said.

She was one of the best bosses I ever had, and she’d pulled me aside to say something I didn’t want to hear. I’d just moved into a great role, working for a leader I liked, and she was happy for me. It would be easy for me to stay behind the scenes, out of sight. She knew my default. I’ve always been reluctant to stand in the spotlight, even when the job puts me there.

So what? I don’t care who gets the credit.

That’s when she said it. Your team cares.

Years earlier, I’d worked for a boss who made all of this look easy. He asked about my family, my vacations, my life outside the building, the things most bosses never bother with. He was the first person who showed me that leadership starts with the people. He was also a student of savviness. He made the right connections, he had the right people speak for him when he wasn’t in the room, he was good at being seen.

I told myself that part was just politics. Good for him. Let him work the room. I’ll do the real work.

So that’s what I did. He was the front man. I was the one behind the curtain: the strategist, the closer, the one making it happen where nobody was looking. And here’s the thing. Back then it was just my own work I was hiding. No team behind me, just me and the results. Waving off my own credit cost no one but me, so who cared. I was the one doing the work.

Then I did it again with the next leader. Same setup, same story. Him out front, me in the wings. It felt like humility.

It wasn’t.

And it stopped being harmless the day I had a team.

That’s what I’d missed. My people were recognized. I told them when they did well, their reviews were strong, their raises fair, their work known to me. I thought that was the job. But being seen by me was never going to get them the next role, the stretch project, the promotion. For that, the people above me had to see them. And those people couldn’t, because I was still standing where I’d always stood, behind the curtain, with my whole team behind it too.

I want to tell you I’d made some principled choice to stay back there. I hadn’t. It was just easy. Quiet, heads-down, out of the spotlight, that’s the natural shape of me, and I’d let that shape settle into a habit and started calling the habit humility.

It was never that noble. It was just comfortable.

And the savviness I’d written off in that first boss, the connections, the right word in the right room, someone speaking for you when you’re not there? That’s not politics I get to be above. It’s a skill. My team needs it from me, and I’m not naturally good at it. So that’s the part I have to step up. Not for me. For them.

I’m still building it, because left to my defaults I’ll disappear again and take their visibility with me. So when we launch something, I put the person who led it in front of the senior team to walk it through in their own words, while I sit off to the side. Every month I send a note up the chain naming what we did and exactly who did it. I keep a running file of each person’s wins so nothing quietly disappears before review time. None of it comes naturally to me. I do it anyway.

So here’s what I had to sit with, and maybe you do too. The part of you that stays out of the spotlight, the part you’ve been calling humble. It might just be the easy way to be. And your team is the one paying for it.

If you won’t broadcast your team’s wins, who will?

We are not born for ourselves alone. — Cicero