“Success belongs to the team; failure belongs to me alone”

The Rule You Live By Without Naming ItYou watch the Slack channel go quiet after a product launch. Your first internal narration isn't 'we're regrouping' or 'the team is processing feedback.' It's 'I didn't communicate clearly enough.' A successful quarter arrives—you mention the team's effort, their execution, their solve. A missed target appears—you say 'I missed it.' The logic feels airtight: if you take full blame, you can't be blindsided by others' judgment, and you can't be the leader who hides behind the group. So you don't. You own every loss personally while distributing every win. The accounting is clear. The cost is that you're tracking two different ledgers with one…

How a One-Way Ledger Erodes What You Actually SeeWhen you assign all wins to the team and all losses to yourself, you stop seeing your own contribution to either. A successful quarter succeeds because the team executed—and also because you shaped the strategy, hired them, or cleared obstacles they didn't know existed. A missed target misses because you failed—and also because market timing shifted, a key hire didn't land, or the brief was incomplete from the start. By keeping failure entirely in your column and success entirely in theirs, you're not being humble. You're being blind to the patterns in your own judgment. Over time, that isolation—the weight of carrying every loss alone…

Testing What Happens When You Name One Win and One Loss SeparatelyPick a recent win and a recent loss. For the win: write down three specific things the team did, and one specific thing you did—not as a leader 'facilitating' but as a decision-maker or problem-solver. For the loss: write down three things the team faced, and one thing you faced or chose. Don't share this. Just notice whether naming your actual role in both changes what feels true when you read it back. The point isn't to flip the ledger—to blame the team for losses or take sole credit for wins. The point is to see whether the honest version of both columns together reads differently than the split version you carry alone.