Success comes from helping others succeed

There are moments in leadership where the usual tools stop working.

The encouragement feels hollow. Rolling up your sleeves isn't enough. The metrics don't care about the weight people are carrying.

I lived through one of those moments leading a large operation during one of the most disruptive periods any of us had faced. Demand wasn't waiting. People were getting sick. The demands from above were significant. And I could see it in the eyes of my team.

I was on the floor with them every day. Present. Working alongside them.

It just wasn't cutting it.

And when all eyes turned to me, not for a pep talk, but for something real, I had to ask myself an honest question first: why are we here?

The only thing that came to mind was meaning.

The best analogy I could think of was to say the experience and hardship would become medals we would all carry throughout our careers. Some sort of analogy in which I used words like scars, struggles, strength, difficulties. I used positive words like satisfaction and pride. All experiences you can't get from a book, a classroom, or a normal year at work. Hard-earned. Permanent. Yours.

I could've said: work hard. For you. For the team. Yes, for the company as well, but difficult situations help you gather transferable tokens to grow and get you closer to whatever it is you're trying to get to. Or something like that. Hindsight is 20/20.

I checked myself as I said it. Looking for anything hollow or manipulative in the words. I couldn't find it. I was tired too but because I had lived through moments that made me face that question before, that was genuinely how I saw it.

That moment taught me something that helped me shape what individual success actually means.

It's not a performance metric. It's the ability to connect what you're living through to something that matters, to yourself first, and then to the people around you.

Success for me comes from helping others succeed.

As a leader, you can't and shouldn't manufacture that. You can definitely help shape the raw material that each one uses to articulate what success looks like for them. And while identifying what success looks like for you is worth articulating in both good and hard times, sometimes, in the hardest moments, that's the only thing left to give.