When the Team Wins, Everyone Celebrates. When It Loses, Someone Gets Fired.

Leadership & The Human...Career, Identity & Rei...
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I’m not really a sports person. At all.

I probably understand more of the rules than I’ll admit. But I do not miss standing in the freezing cold for three hours at a football game.

In high school, I was a cheerleader for a brief and confusing chapter of my life. That story includes questionable bangs, a short skirt, and absolutely no athletic insight.

Still—even I can’t miss the pattern.

When teams win, they celebrate together. When teams lose, fingers start pointing—fast—and almost always at one person.

I couldn’t help but think about the familiar storyline that plays out whenever a high-profile coach gets let go. The headlines. The hot takes. The sudden certainty—after the fact—about what he should have done differently.

And it hit me: This isn’t about sports. This is about organizations.

Because I’ve lived this pattern from the inside.

For years, my work put me right in the middle of leadership transitions—ushering “old” leaders out, onboarding “new” leaders in, and standing in front of anxious teams assuring them that everything was going to be okay.

And most of the time? It was okay.

But that’s not really the point.

The point is that someone always has to take the fall.

I’ve seen this pattern so many times it almost has choreography. Early warning signs get ignored. Tradeoffs pile up quietly. Constraints harden. Performance slips. And then—suddenly—there’s urgency.

Not to fix the system. To replace the person.

A leader becomes the container for everyone else’s discomfort.

When performance dips, trust erodes, or strategy stalls, we often rewrite history. We zoom out the competing priorities, the cultural drift, the underinvestment, the mixed messages—and we zoom way in on a single name.

It’s cleaner that way. More satisfying. More narratively convenient.

But it’s rarely honest.

What rarely makes the headlines—or the town halls—is everything leaders carry before things unravel. The compromises. The inherited constraints. The decisions made with partial information and full consequences.

By the time a leader becomes the problem, they’ve often been managing one for a very long time.

I’ve watched entire organizations quietly exhale once a leader exits, as if removing one person magically removes complexity. As if the same structures, incentives, and behaviors won’t quietly reproduce the same outcomes—just with a different name on the door.

Leadership is a team sport, whether we admit it or not.

Yet when things go sideways, we suddenly act like leadership happens in isolation.

Blame feels productive. It gives the illusion of action without requiring change.

Accountability, on the other hand, asks harder questions—and usually more than one person has to answer them.

Before we replace a leader, it’s worth pausing to ask:

  • What did we ask this person to carry alone?

  • What problems were already baked into the system when they arrived?

  • Where did we reward speed over sustainability?

  • What did we tolerate, avoid, or normalize along the way?

If we don’t ask these questions, we’re not solving anything—we’re just resetting the clock.

I wasn’t watching these moments from the sidelines. I was often the one standing between leadership and the organization—translating endings into reassurance and calling it stability.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve learned:

If a leader failed, they didn’t fail alone. And if a team succeeded, it wasn’t because of one hero.

BGPD Rule

If a team only wins together but loses alone, the problem isn’t leadership—it’s accountability.

And accountability, unlike blame, is a team sport.

Because if the system stays the same, the next leader is already in trouble.

Further Reading (because if you’re still here, you’re my people):

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Happenstance, Yeses, and the Business I Didn’t Plan
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Output Optional. Presence Required. (The Work That Doesn’t Show Up on a To-Do List)