"You Said 'I'm So Proud of My Team.' Here's Why That Might Be the Wrong Word."

Pride gets treated as one of leadership's good words. "I'm so proud of this team." "We take pride in what we do." Said with warmth, it sounds like the highest compliment a leader can give. But pride carries a quieter cost that's worth examining, because the word you reach for shapes the posture you actually take toward your team.

Here's the distinction worth sitting with: pride is taken. Respect is given.

When you say "I'm proud of you," the sentence is still centered on you: your approval, your assessment, your feeling about their performance. When you say "I respect you," the center of gravity shifts entirely to them. It's a small linguistic swap with a real behavioral echo, and it's the argument at the heart of a short, sharp piece by Nicholas Fair Nowak, worth reading in full, that suggests leaders swap "pride" language for "respect" language across the board: "we take pride in our culture" becomes "we respect our culture," and so on.

The Research Backs This Up, With Sharper Edges

Psychologists actually split pride into two distinct kinds, and the difference matters more than the shared word suggests. Authentic pride is grounded in real effort and genuine accomplishment — it tends to correlate with humility, prosocial behavior, and ethical decision-making. Hubristic pride is a different animal entirely: an inflated, often unearned sense of superiority, and it's the version that shows up most dangerously in leadership. Research has linked hubristic pride to lower agreeableness, weaker self-control, and a measurably higher likelihood of leaders engaging in unethical or even illegal conduct the kind of pattern that surfaces again and again in the corporate scandals people study for years afterward.

The data on humility versus hubris is just as pointed. Leaders high in humility have been found to adapt to changing circumstances meaningfully faster than their hubristic counterparts, while narcissistic managers who often rise quickly precisely because confidence reads as competence early on tend to leave their teams underperforming compared to more humble peers over the long run. Hubris predicts resistance to feedback, a disregard for rules, and an unwillingness to accept responsibility when something goes wrong. None of that is subtle. It's the leadership equivalent of a slow leak.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds

Pride, even the well-intentioned kind, quietly centers the leader in a story that should center the team. "I'm proud of you" can land warmly, but it also positions the leader as the judge whose approval was the point. "I respect what you did here" does something different; it acknowledges the work on its own terms, without needing the leader's validation to complete the sentence.

This isn't an argument to never feel proud, or to police every word in casual conversation. It's an invitation to notice the pattern. If your default response to good work is pride an emotion centered on your own satisfaction versus respect, an orientation centered on someone else's effort, that pattern shapes how your team experiences being led by you over time. One quietly says "I did well by them." The other says "look what they did."

What to Do With This This Week

Swap the word once, deliberately. The next time you're about to say "I'm proud of you" or "we take pride in this," try "I respect what you did" or "this reflects real respect for our work" instead, and notice how the sentence changes shape.

Watch your own reaction to praise. When someone compliments your team, notice whether your instinct is to accept it as a reflection on your leadership, or to redirect the credit to the people who actually did the work.

Ask which kind of pride is showing up in you. Authentic pride grounded, connected to real effort is worth keeping. Hubristic pride inflated, resistant to feedback, centered on your own image is worth catching early, before it hardens into the pattern the research warns about.

None of this requires a personality overhaul. It requires noticing one word, and what it quietly assumes about who the story is really about.

Want an honest look at how your leadership actually centers your team or centers you? Take the FREE Leadership Assessment.

Suggested read: Nowak, N.F., "Why We Shouldn't Take Pride in Leadership", GoodMenders — a short, worthwhile piece that first made this distinction clearly, including a personal story about what respect (rather than pride) looked like during the Pan-Mass Challenge.

Sources:

Nowak, N.F., "Why We Shouldn't Take Pride in Leadership", GoodMenders PMC / NIH, "On Ethically Solvent Leaders: The Roles of Pride and Moral Identity in Predicting Leader Ethical Behavior" Innovative Human Capital, "The Perils of Pride: Overcoming Hubris by Facing Failure Head On" Forbes, "Effective Leaders Choose Humility Over Hubris"