by Joseph A. Brennan
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Marcus sat in his car after his annual review, staring at the parking garage wall, wondering what had gone wrong.
As director of the counseling center for a private college, he’d just led his team through their best year in a decade. Student mental health markers were improving, and thanks to a complete overhaul of their case management procedures and technology, the counseling team was spending more time with clients and less time on paperwork and scheduling.
He’d walked his vice president through every success. The VP listened, nodded, then said: “I know you have a good team, Marcus. But I’m not clear what your role is in all this. What did you personally contribute?”
Marcus had mumbled something about “providing strategic direction” and “supporting the team.” The VP looked unconvinced, and Marcus left her office confused by her reaction and disappointed by his inability to communicate his specific accomplishments. That evening, Marcus called me.
I asked him what his real challenge was, and he said he didn’t want to take credit away from the people who’d done the work. His assistant director had redesigned the office procedures, and the counselors agreed to add sessions on evenings and weekends and to take on two more interns. Marcus saw how hard they worked and the stress they were under, and he admired them for handling hundreds of difficult situations with professionalism and grace. Claiming their accomplishments as his own felt deeply wrong.
As we talked, Marcus discovered a deeper issue. He wasn’t just being humble. He actually wasn’t sure how to articulate his value. This is the question that stops a lot of good leaders cold.
What do you say when your job is creating the conditions for other people to succeed? When your biggest contribution is hiring the right people and getting out of their way? When the work you’re most proud of is something that other people did?
“We” Honors Your Team but Can Obscure Your Impact
Marcus’s struggle is common. It comes from a real tension between what gets measured and what happens behind the scenes that makes those results possible.
Four patterns create this problem:
Confusing leadership with doing. Marcus didn’t personally counsel the students or implement the software, so he believes he could not legitimately claim these achievements. Absorbing messages about servant leadership. Putting others first is a deep value for Marcus, making him feel it would be wrong to talk about his own role. Genuinely not wanting to diminish the team. He did not want to diminish his team by claiming credit for what he saw as belonging to talented people who worked hard. Being uncomfortable with authority. Saying “I decided” or “I made the call” can feel presumptuous, especially in higher education, where collaboration is highly prized.
These patterns matter because they create real consequences for your career. Here’s the truth: people genuinely can’t tell what you contributed when you say, “We accomplished this.”
Did you lead the initiative or just participate? Was this your idea or your boss’s directive? Did you design the strategy or merely implement someone else’s plan? If you don’t explain it, people don’t know, and this ambiguity hurts you everywhere.
Your supervisor can’t justify a merit raise without documenting your specific value. Senior leaders wonder if you’re building institutional capacity or just showing up, and they may pass you over for promotion. Search committees can’t fully evaluate your candidacy when you say “we.” Your own team may interpret constant “we” language as a sign you are not comfortable with your leadership role.
The answer, of course, is not to stop saying “we” and only say “I.” If you never mention your team, you signal you’re either a lone wolf or a credit hog. In higher education, both are disqualifying.
Do This Instead
Every time you communicate about an achievement-in any context-use this structure:
Part 1: State the outcome clearly.
Lead with specific, measurable results. “We reduced first-year attrition due to mental health crises by 12%.” “Student use of counseling services grew 10% without adding professional staff.” “Case resolution time dropped from 14 days to 6 days.”
This establishes significance and credibility.
Part 2: Own your specific leadership role.
Be concrete about decisions and actions you took. “I made the strategic call to shift resources from reactive crisis response to proactive student support.” “I restructured the team to create dedicated early intervention roles.” “I hired an assistant director with expertise in clinical operations to redesign our scheduling.”
This makes your individual contribution visible and accessible.
Part 3: Credit team execution.
Name people or roles and specifically state what they did. “Our senior counselor built partnerships with academic departments that transformed how we identify struggling students.” “Jen found a way to reallocate funds for a new scheduling system.” “Our clinicians piloted new proactive intervention strategies that worked.”
This shows you understand leadership includes developing others and supporting them in trying new approaches.
Tailor It to Your Audience
The framework stays the same. What changes is emphasis.
Your board or president needs evidence of strategic thinking and proof you’re building institutional capacity. Lead with your decisions and follow with team performance.
Your team needs recognition for their contributions and understanding of strategic direction. Lead with collective outcome, name individual contributions publicly-unless someone prefers privacy, in which case tailor the language to focus on the work, not the individual.
Search committees need to see you can get results, work across the organization, and lead teams. Vague ‘we’ language obscures all three-which is why those trained in behavioral interviewing will probe until they understand your specific role.
Your performance reviewer needs to understand your decisions and actions, the reasoning behind them, and how you develop and empower your team as evidence of your leadership effectiveness and impact.
When executives or interviewers ask follow-up questions-“Walk me through your specific role” or “What did you decide versus what your boss directed?”-they’re not challenging your integrity. They’re trying to understand the specific shape and size of your contribution. Answer directly using the three-part structure.
Change Your Mindset
This isn’t about memorizing a checklist. People can tell when you’re mechanically following a formula versus genuinely believing what you’re saying.
The framework only works if you’ve made a deeper shift in how you see your role as a leader. Your job isn’t to be the most impressive person in the room. Your job is to make other people’s excellence visible.
When you genuinely believe this, it’s easy to tell the story of your value, because you’re honestly reporting about how leadership actually works: you make strategic decisions; you create conditions; other people bring expertise you don’t have. Together you achieve things none of you could do alone.
Here’s the paradox: leaders who genuinely share credit build stronger reputations than those who hoard it. But you have to do it consistently because you actually believe that making others successful is your job, not because you’re managing your reputation.
Before your next board presentation, performance review, or interview, ask yourself: Do I see myself as the hero of this story, or as the person who created conditions for others to achieve results?
Your answer determines whether the three-part framework sounds authentic or manipulative.
The best leaders I’ve encountered over three decades measure their success by what their teams accomplish, not by how impressive they personally appear. That’s not a communication technique. That’s a leadership philosophy. And it shows up in every word they say about their achievements.
Your communication about achievements reveals your leadership philosophy. What does yours reveal?
Marcus, Three Weeks Later
A few weeks after our conversation, Marcus called again, eager to tell me what he’d tried. After we spoke, Marcus asked his VP for a follow-up meeting. This time, he came prepared to clearly communicate his contributions to the counseling center’s successes.
“We reduced first-year attrition due to mental health crises by 12%,” he told her. “I analyzed our data and saw we were losing students right after midterms when academic stress peaked. That’s when I made the decision to reallocate resources toward proactive outreach instead of just crisis response. I restructured job responsibilities so our senior counselor could build partnerships with faculty to identify struggling students earlier. She and the team developed the interventions that reach students before they’re in crisis.”
His VP stopped him. “Thank you, Marcus. That fills in the gap for me. I can see both the strategy and the way you’re growing the team, and that’s important. Well done.”
Humility isn’t hiding your leadership. It’s being honest about how leadership actually works. Marcus had been leading this way all along — he just needed the language to say it.
