"But I didn't do the work. My team did."
I hear some version of this from almost every woman I coach who has stepped into leadership. She held the strategy, organized the effort, cleared the roadblocks, and made the hard calls. Then the project lands, someone asks what she did, and she says "the team."
It sounds humble. It feels like the right thing to say. And it's quietly costing her the promotion.
We were all taught there's no I in team
Most of us learned early that pointing to yourself is bragging, and bragging is ugly. For women in tech, that lesson got reinforced every time someone called us "a lot" for taking up space in a meeting.
So when we step into leadership, we do the thing that feels safe. We say "we" for everything. We put our team in the spotlight and stand just off to the side of it.
The problem is what leadership sees from there. They don't see a humble leader. They see a project that went well with no clear owner. And when nobody can say who owned it, nobody gets promoted for it.
Who gets the review
Think about a great restaurant. The chef isn't cooking every dish every night. There's a sous chef, line cooks, a whole kitchen. But when the review comes out, it's the chef's name in it.
Nobody thinks that's unfair. The chef set the menu. She decided what good looks like, trained the kitchen, and owns what goes out to the table. The kitchen makes it real. The chef makes it hers.
Or think about a concert. You bought the ticket for the artist. The backup singers are incredible, the band is tight, and without them the show wouldn't sound half as good. At the end of the night, the artist thanks every one of them by name. And the artist is still the center of the show.
When you lead a team, you're the artist. Stop singing backup on your own stage.
Why this gets harder after a promotion
This is where a lot of new leaders get stuck. When you were an individual contributor, your worth was easy to measure. You wrote the code, ran the tests, shipped the thing. You could point at it.
Then you start leading, and the work moves into other people's hands. You're in meetings. You're unblocking people. You're making decisions that don't produce anything you can hold up. If your sense of worth is still tied to what you personally produce, handing work off starts to feel like losing value.
So one of two things happens. You grab work back so you have something to show, and you burn out. Or you let your team take all the credit, and you disappear.
Both come from the same place. You're still measuring yourself by your old job.
Naming your part helps your team too
Some women worry that claiming credit means taking it from the people who did the hands-on work. It works the other way around.
When you're clear about what you owned, you also get to be clear about what each person on your team did. "I set the direction and made the call to cut scope in week three. Sam built the pipeline that made it possible." Both of you are visible in that sentence.
If you only say "the team did it," nobody gets seen. You don't, and they don't either.
If claiming credit still feels icky, think about it as service. You're making sure leadership knows what your team can do. You're making sure the next big project comes to your group. That's part of your job now.
A test you can run this week
Pick one win from the last quarter that your team delivered. Write two sentences about it.
The first sentence is what you owned: the decision you made, the direction you set, the risk you saw coming. Use "I."
The second sentence names the people who made it real and what each of them did.
Read both out loud. If the first one was harder to write, that's your leak. Say both sentences to your manager this week.
The best leaders I know thank their team every chance they get. They also never forget whose name is on the ticket. You can do both.
If you're not sure where your worth is leaking, the POWER Clarity Snapshot takes a few minutes at clarity.erikachestnut.com.