The secret ingredient isn’t being a top performer. It’s something most people never talk about.
Fifteen years. Ten-plus managers. Some forgettable, some frustrating, and a few who genuinely changed where my career went.
When I look back at the managers who made the biggest difference, there’s a pattern. It wasn’t that they were the smartest people in the room. It wasn’t their track record. The best ones shared something else: an emotional security that freed them from needing to prove themselves.
Let me tell you what I mean.
The fair credit dictum
Early in my career, I had a manager who was obsessive about one thing: making sure credit went where it belonged.
When a project succeeded, he didn’t send a vague “great team effort” email. He named people. He called out who did the hard work, who solved the tricky problems, who stayed late to push it across the line. If multiple people contributed, everyone got mentioned. But the alpha contributors got highlighted.
That wasn’t the remarkable part.
The remarkable part was what he did next. He’d take those contributors to meet the CXOs. Not himself presenting the work with his team in the background. Them presenting, him in the background.
At the time, I thought this was generous. Now I realize it was strategic. He understood something that insecure managers never grasp: his success was downstream of his team’s success. By giving them visibility, he was building a team that people wanted to join. A team that worked harder because they felt seen. And that made him look like exactly what he was: a leader who could develop talent.
I’ve carried that lesson ever since. When multiple people contribute, call out all of them. Highlight the ones who carried the weight. Take them to the rooms they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
The mistake meeting
I still remember the dread walking into that conference room.
I had made a mistake. A real one, the kind with downstream consequences. I’d been running scenarios in my head all morning. Would there be shouting? A formal warning? That cold, disappointed silence that’s somehow worse than anger?
My manager looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten:
“It’s okay to make mistakes. Everyone makes them. What’s not okay is making the same one twice. That means you’re not learning.”
That was it. No drama. No drawn-out post-mortem designed to make me feel small. Just a principle, delivered calmly, that I still use today.
What struck me wasn’t the words. It was the security behind them. A manager who needs to perform outrage, who needs to make you grovel, is usually managing their own anxiety. This one wasn’t. He was focused on the only thing that actually mattered: making sure I learned something.
The other kind
Not all my managers were like this.
We were working on a high-profile, time-bound project. I disagreed with some UX decisions the design head was making. I raised my concerns to my manager, laid out my reasoning, asked for support.
He sided with the design head.
Fine. Managers have to make calls, and sometimes you’re wrong. I moved on and executed the decision.
Then the product launched. The UX decisions I’d flagged fell flat. Users struggled with exactly the flows I’d predicted would cause problems.
And in the post-launch review? My manager was suddenly on the other side, pinning the failure squarely on my shoulders. The same decision he’d backed was now my mistake.
That was the day I decided to leave. Not because I was blamed. Blame happens. But because I realized I was working for someone who would never have my back when it mattered. Someone whose own standing was more important than the truth.
The contrast with my good managers couldn’t have been sharper. They didn’t need to protect themselves at my expense. They were secure enough to own collective decisions as collective decisions, win or lose.
What actually makes the difference
After fifteen years of watching this play out, here’s the pattern I see in managers who transform teams:
They have an emotional security that lets them celebrate others without feeling diminished. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. They don’t need every success to have their fingerprints visibly on it.
They’re genuinely collaborative. Not as a buzzword, but as a core belief. They’ve always thought 1+1 can equal 3, whether as individual contributors or leaders.
They get real satisfaction from developing others. Not career-advancement satisfaction, but the kind where they light up when someone on their team figures something out.
And they understand that leadership is a completely different skill from being a high performer. Some people never make this leap. They keep trying to be the best individual contributor in a room full of people they’re supposed to be enabling.
My own learning curve
I’ll be honest: when I was given responsibility for a sixty-person team across Product, Design, and SEO, I was overwhelmed.
My first instinct was to do what had always worked. Work harder. Be across everything. Prove I deserved the role. I was trying to do too much, and it was burning me out.
Leadership coaching helped. (My manager had arranged it, which itself told me something about the kind of leader he was.) But the real shift was internal.
I had to accept that for me to be successful, my team had to be successful. And for that to happen, I had to stop being the person who did things and start being the person who enabled others to do things. Available when they needed guidance. Not looking over their shoulders when they didn’t.
If you say you trust your team, you can’t be checking their work constantly. Trust is a behavior, not a statement.
The hardest part for high performers (and I include myself here) is letting go. You got to where you are by being good at things. Now you have to be good at helping others be good at things. It’s a different skill entirely, and it requires setting aside your ego more often than feels comfortable.
What to look for, what to become
If you’re early in your career, pay attention to how your manager handles these moments:
When you succeed, do they share the spotlight or absorb it?
When you fail, do they focus on learning or on blame?
When they’re challenged, do they get defensive or curious?
When you grow, do they seem threatened or delighted?
The answers will tell you whether you’re working for someone who will accelerate your career or just use it to accelerate theirs.
And if you’re a manager yourself, or becoming one, the question is simpler: have you made the shift from proving your worth to multiplying others’ potential?
It’s not about whether you were a top performer. Plenty of great leaders weren’t. Plenty of star individual contributors become mediocre managers.
It’s about whether you’ve developed the emotional security to not need the spotlight, the instinct to believe in leverage over solo effort, and the genuine interest in watching others grow.
That’s the formula I’ve seen work, over and over:
Emotional security + collaborative instinct + genuine investment in others’ growth = leadership that actually transforms teams.
Everything else is just management.