Let Them Be Brilliant Without You
The joy of taking pride in others
It’s an odd feeling, being proud of something you didn’t really do. But that’s the only way I can describe the best moments in my career.
They aren’t mine at all.
They belong to the people I’ve worked with, mentored, supported, or just occasionally nudged in the right direction. Seeing them succeed, grow, move into leadership roles, or take risks I was too afraid to take when I was in their position, it’s the greatest privilege I’ve had in my career.
And here’s the thing I’ve come to believe: if you’re leading an L&D team, running a learning function, or simply further along in your career, your job is not to be the best. Your job is to help others get there faster than you did.
That’s not self-deprecating, it’s strategic.
L&D loves to talk about succession planning, internal capability, and knowledge transfer, but too often, that gets reduced to shadowing and documentation. What we rarely talk about is what it means emotionally and professionally to build people who will surpass you.
It can be uncomfortable.
If you’re used to being the expert in the room, it can feel like you’re losing ground. If you’re the one who built the programme, it’s hard to watch someone else reshape it into something better. If you’ve been the go-to person, it’s disorienting when someone else becomes the trusted source.
But it’s also exactly what we should be aiming for.
When someone on your team takes something you started and makes it better, take that as your win.
When a former colleague gets promoted past you or becomes a sought-after speaker, let that be your legacy.
When someone tells you they only did something brave because of a conversation you had over a terrible coffee in a breakout room, that’s the stuff that matters.
I know this isn’t a strategy post or a model you can implement. It’s not going to help you get board sign-off for a new capability framework.
But it might help you find a better measure of success in a profession that is so often about building others.
And if you're lucky enough to lead, even informally, I hope you'll find pride not in what you build yourself, but in what grows because of you.
OMGoodness, did I ever need all of these words now that I'm in the last 1/3rd of my career. Thank you Tom for sharing your wisdom - greatly appreciated.
Resonates so much, Tom. I stumbled into working in learning design and then L&D more widely in my late 30s. I remember saying to the first person I managed that they had 15 years more potential than I and how excited I was to see what they achieved - the bonus for me was to see how they responded by becoming more open to sharing ideas and experimenting, progress for both of us!