Learn why leadership is not about being the best. Discover how shifting focus from personal excellence to team elevation transforms leadership effectiveness.
Written by Laura Bouttell • Wed 25th February 2026
Leadership is not about being the best—this insight challenges the competitive mindset that many leaders carry from their individual contributor days into leadership roles. Research by Google's Project Aristotle, studying hundreds of teams, found that the highest-performing teams were not those led by the most technically skilled individual but those where leaders created psychological safety and enabled others to contribute fully. The best individual does not make the best leader; the leader who elevates others does.
This shift in understanding matters profoundly. Many leaders struggle because they approach leadership as a continuation of individual excellence—striving to be the smartest, most capable, most accomplished person in the room. But leadership operates by different rules. Success comes not from outperforming others but from enabling others to perform at their best.
This guide explores why leadership is not about personal superiority and what it is actually about.
When leaders focus on being the best, they create problems that undermine the very results they seek.
Problems with best-focused leadership:
Competition with team: Leaders who need to be the best compete with rather than enable their people. Every team member's success threatens their position.
Information hoarding: Sharing knowledge helps others excel, which threatens the leader's superiority. So knowledge stays locked up.
Micromanagement: If the leader is the best, their judgment must be superior. This logic leads to controlling how others work.
Credit taking: Achievements must flow to the leader to maintain their position as the best. Team contributions get minimised.
Talent threat: Highly capable team members threaten the leader's position. Rather than developing them, the leader may marginalise them.
Bottleneck creation: If the leader must be involved in everything to demonstrate expertise, decisions and progress slow.
Impact comparison:
| Leader Focus | Team Impact | Organisational Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Being the best | Competition, disengagement | Limited by leader capacity |
| Enabling others | Collaboration, commitment | Multiplied by team capacity |
Research consistently shows that leaders focused on personal superiority underperform those focused on team enablement.
Research findings:
A Stanford study found that leaders high in narcissism—a trait often associated with needing to be the best—had teams with 20% lower engagement and 35% higher turnover.
Harvard Business Review research indicates that humble leaders—those who do not need to be seen as the best—produce better organisational performance through enhanced team learning and collaboration.
Gallup data shows that the primary predictor of team engagement is whether the manager seems to care about team members' development, not whether the manager is the most skilled individual.
If leadership is not about being the best, what is it about? Research and experience point to a fundamentally different purpose.
Leadership is about:
Enabling others' success: The leader's job is to create conditions where others succeed. Success flows to the team, not from the team to the leader.
Developing capability: Leaders develop others' capabilities, building the organisational capacity that individual brilliance cannot create.
Providing direction: Leaders clarify purpose and direction so others' efforts align toward shared goals.
Creating environment: Leaders shape culture, remove obstacles, and establish conditions where good work becomes possible.
Making decisions: Leaders make decisions others cannot, particularly those requiring broader perspective or authority.
Taking responsibility: Leaders accept accountability for outcomes, shielding others from blame while sharing credit for success.
Purpose contrast:
| False Purpose | True Purpose |
|---|---|
| Be the smartest | Enable smart contributions |
| Outperform the team | Help the team outperform |
| Demonstrate expertise | Develop others' expertise |
| Receive credit | Create success to share |
| Prove superiority | Remove obstacles to others' success |
Bringing out the best in others means helping people contribute more fully than they would without your leadership.
Bringing out the best involves:
Seeing potential: Recognising capabilities in others that they may not see in themselves.
Creating opportunity: Providing chances for people to develop and demonstrate their abilities.
Removing obstacles: Clearing barriers that prevent people from doing their best work.
Providing support: Giving resources, guidance, and encouragement people need to succeed.
Challenging appropriately: Stretching people beyond comfort zones while maintaining achievable expectations.
Recognising contribution: Acknowledging and celebrating what people accomplish.
Many leaders struggle with this shift because their previous success came from individual excellence.
Transition challenges:
Identity threat: If your identity was "the best at X," becoming a leader who enables others' excellence threatens who you believe yourself to be.
Skill mismatch: The skills that made you an excellent individual contributor—technical expertise, personal productivity, independent problem-solving—differ from leadership skills.
Recognition change: Individual contributors receive direct recognition for their work. Leaders' contributions are less visible, filtered through team achievement.
Control loss: Individual contributors control their own quality. Leaders must accept that others' work will differ from what they would produce.
Competition habit: Years of competing to be the best create habits difficult to abandon when leadership requires enabling competitors.
Successful transition requires deliberate effort across multiple dimensions.
Transition strategies:
1. Redefine success: Explicitly reframe success from personal achievement to team achievement. Your wins are their wins.
2. Develop new skills: Invest in developing coaching, delegation, and enabling skills that differ from technical expertise.
3. Shift identity: Build identity around developing others rather than outperforming them.
4. Accept different recognition: Learn to find satisfaction in others' success, not just direct acknowledgment.
5. Release control: Accept that others will work differently from you and that different can be equally good.
6. Transform competition: Compete with other teams and external challenges, not with your own people.
Transition progression:
| Stage | Internal Experience | External Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Resistance | "But I'm the best at this" | Doing work yourself, micromanaging |
| Struggle | "This is uncomfortable" | Attempting delegation, taking back |
| Practice | "I'm learning to let go" | Genuine delegation with support |
| Integration | "Their success is my success" | Natural enabling and developing |
Enabling leadership focuses on creating conditions for others' success rather than demonstrating personal superiority.
Enabling leader behaviours:
Ask rather than tell: Enabling leaders ask questions that help others think rather than providing answers that display knowledge.
Delegate for development: Assign work that stretches people, not merely work you want off your plate.
Provide resources: Ensure people have what they need—information, tools, time, authority—to succeed.
Remove obstacles: Clear organisational barriers that impede good work.
Coach through challenges: Help people work through difficulties rather than solving problems for them.
Celebrate others: Direct recognition toward the team, not toward yourself.
Create safety: Make it safe to take risks, make mistakes, and learn.
Team development is central to enabling leadership.
Development approaches:
Regular feedback: Provide ongoing, specific feedback that helps people improve.
Growth conversations: Discuss aspirations, development needs, and career paths with each team member.
Stretch assignments: Create opportunities that expand capability beyond current levels.
Mentoring access: Connect people with mentors and sponsors who can support their development.
Learning investment: Allocate time and resources for formal learning opportunities.
Succession focus: Develop people to take on greater responsibility, including your own role.
Understanding the drivers helps leaders address them.
Need drivers:
Insecurity: Fear of inadequacy drives need for superiority as proof of worth.
Past conditioning: Decades of being rewarded for being the best create deep habits.
Identity: Self-concept built on excellence feels threatened by leadership's different definition of success.
Comparison culture: Organisational cultures that rank and rate reinforce competitive orientations.
Control needs: Being the best provides a sense of control that enabling others lacks.
Each driver requires specific approaches.
Overcoming strategies:
| Driver | Strategy |
|---|---|
| Insecurity | Build security from character and values, not achievement |
| Past conditioning | Deliberately practice new patterns; reward yourself for enabling |
| Identity | Reconstruct identity around developing others |
| Comparison culture | Redefine your comparison set; compete with yourself |
| Control needs | Find control in setting direction and conditions, not execution |
Daily practices for overcoming:
Leaders who focus on elevating others rather than being the best achieve distinctive results.
Outcome categories:
Team performance: Teams led by enabling leaders outperform those led by competitive leaders because full team capability is mobilised.
Engagement: People are more engaged when their leader invests in their development rather than competing with them.
Retention: Talented people stay when they are developed rather than marginalised.
Innovation: Psychological safety and shared ownership enable innovation that competitive cultures suppress.
Succession: Enabling leaders develop successors; competitive leaders create vacuums.
Leader wellbeing: Enabling leadership is more sustainable than constant competition with your own team.
Performance comparison:
| Metric | Best-Focused Leaders | Enabling Leaders |
|---|---|---|
| Team engagement | Lower | Higher |
| Retention | Lower | Higher |
| Innovation | Constrained | Enhanced |
| Succession strength | Weak | Strong |
| Leader burnout | Higher | Lower |
Organisations with enabling leaders at multiple levels experience systemic benefits.
Organisational benefits:
Capability multiplication: Each enabling leader multiplies capability through developing others.
Culture improvement: Enabling leadership creates cultures where development and collaboration are normal.
Leadership pipeline: Enabling leaders build the next generation of leaders; competitive leaders do not.
Adaptability: Distributed capability enables organisations to adapt more readily to change.
Sustainable performance: Performance built on many capable people sustains better than performance dependent on individual heroes.
Shifting from being the best to elevating others requires practical steps.
Starting points:
1. Assess honestly: Where do you compete with rather than enable your team? What triggers defensive superiority?
2. Choose one person: Select one team member to focus on developing. Make their growth your project.
3. Ask more questions: In meetings and conversations, discipline yourself to ask questions before providing answers.
4. Delegate meaningfully: Identify work you do because you are "the best" at it and delegate it for development purposes.
5. Redirect credit: When you receive recognition, immediately redirect it to team members who contributed.
6. Celebrate others: Create occasions to recognise team members' achievements.
7. Get feedback: Ask team members whether they feel enabled or competed with. Listen without defending.
Tracking progress helps sustain the shift.
Progress indicators:
| Indicator | Competing | Enabling |
|---|---|---|
| Team capability growth | Stagnant | Increasing |
| Team engagement scores | Lower | Higher |
| Succession readiness | Weak | Strong |
| Credit distribution | Centralised | Distributed |
| Question/answer ratio | Answer-heavy | Question-rich |
| Delegation level | Limited | Extensive |
Leadership is not about being the best because leadership success comes from enabling others' performance, not from individual superiority. Leaders who focus on being the best compete with rather than enable their teams, limiting organisational capability to what the leader alone can produce.
Leadership is about creating conditions where others succeed, developing people's capabilities, providing direction and purpose, removing obstacles, and taking responsibility for outcomes. It is about multiplying impact through others rather than adding impact through personal contribution.
Shift by redefining success as team achievement, developing coaching and delegation skills, building identity around developing others, learning to find satisfaction in others' success, and releasing the need to control how work is done. This transition requires deliberate practice over time.
Expertise remains valuable, but its purpose shifts. Instead of using expertise to prove superiority, use it to develop others, inform decisions, and add value where technical judgment is needed. Expertise serves the team rather than demonstrating the leader's position.
Some teams expect leaders to be technical experts. Address this by distinguishing between having expertise and needing to be superior. You can have deep knowledge while using it to develop others rather than to dominate. Explicitly discuss the shift you are making and why it serves the team.
Leaders who develop others typically gain more respect than those who compete with them. Research shows that humble, enabling leaders are more respected than narcissistic, competitive ones. Respect follows contribution, and enabling others creates greater contribution than individual achievement.
Being in meetings with more expert people is normal for leaders. Your role is not to have the best answer but to make good decisions drawing on the expertise present. Ask questions, synthesise perspectives, and make decisions. Your value comes from leadership, not from having superior knowledge in every domain.
Leadership is not about being the best—this truth redefines what leadership success means. The leaders who matter most are not those who outshine their teams but those who help their teams shine. The measure is not personal excellence but collective achievement.
This shift challenges deeply held beliefs. Many leaders built careers on being the best, and letting go of that identity feels threatening. But the evidence is clear: leaders who enable others achieve more than leaders who compete with them. Teams led by humble, developing leaders outperform teams led by leaders focused on personal superiority.
The invitation is challenging but clear: stop trying to be the best and start helping others be their best. Your success as a leader is measured not by how much you outperform your team but by how much your team outperforms what they could achieve without you.
This is not weakness but strength. This is not abdication but leadership. This is not less ambition but more—ambition for something greater than personal superiority.
Leadership is not about being the best. Leadership is about bringing out the best in others. That purpose is worth pursuing.