The line in my annual review I'll never forget
I thought I was being a team player. Turns out I was playing it safe.
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My guest pulled up his worst performance review mid-interview and read it out loud:
“I’ve yet to see Dan make teams greater than the sum of their parts.”
He’d been a senior leader at Reforge. Built teams at HubSpot. Sold a company before that.
Impressive resume by any measure.
And yet, the thing that made him exceptional as an individual contributor was quietly killing his team’s ability to function without him as a lead.
He jumped in when things slipped. He fixed what wasn’t done right. He held high standards by modeling them himself.
But over time, his team stopped taking risks. They waited for him to tell them what to do. To fix it. And he ended up doing more and more of the work.
Nobody told him until it was in writing.
I didn’t say anything in that moment.
Because I’ve lived a version of this myself.
I can remember reading my own annual review the night before my performance conversation.
There was a line (that’s permanently seared into my brain) about how my exec team had hoped I’d have more impact in my role.
The company had prioritized hiring more developers over staffing my team.
I was frustrated by the decision, but I understood we needed to ship more and faster. So I disagreed, and committed.
I didn’t sit around whining about it.
I scoped projects to the resources I had available vs advocating for what I really needed. I thought I was being a team player. Adjusting without complaining.
I thought that was the right thing for the company.
But the next day, sitting across from my manager, he said something that caught me off-guard:
“Your job is to pound the table for what you need. If you’re not getting it, break down 99 doors until you get through the 100th. That’s your job. Not to give up after the first no.”
My honest first reaction? I don’t want to pound the table. I just wanted to quietly do good work that spoke for itself.
But I didn’t push back. Because underneath my reaction, I knew he was right.
What I thought was being a team player was actually just playing a smaller game than the role required.
In the process I learned one of the hardest parts of growing as a leader: doing the right thing might not always feel good for you.
And the skill that earned me the role (being a great team player and adapting to changing resource constraints) was the exact skill now holding me back in it.
Dan’s version of this story is more brutal than mine.
He read the actual review out loud on the podcast. The full thing - including the presentation that got zero questions from the exec team, the manager death spiral he created without realizing it, and how he worked through all of it.
It’s this week’s episode of Growing Forward.
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We can’t be the only ones who struggled. What’s your version of this?
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