Many workers climb the career ladder believing that someone else has to fall off for them to rise. But former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris says that’s not only wrong—it’s what’s holding people back.
“There are far too many people in this world and in professional life who approach things with a zero-sum game,” Harris said recently on The Diary of a CEO podcast. “If I have more, you have less. And it is incredibly shortsighted.”
Unfortunately, she added, it’s the exact mindset that may have hurt her chances of becoming the chief of state. Harris had sensed for “quite some time” that White House staffers were stifling her career accomplishments while working alongside former U.S. president Joe Biden—downplaying the impressive track record that proved she had the chops for the job. A symptom of that same scarcity mindset.
Instead of hyping up her career accomplishments, presidential employees shrouded them—and Harris felt it was an intentional choice to make sure she didn’t outshine Biden. But it may have backfired when she stepped up as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential race against Donald Trump, which she recently spoke about at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit.
Looking back now, the 61-year-old Democrat said that suppressing others’ success doesn’t protect your own—it just undermines the entire mission.
“It’s actually quite provincial thinking when you’re talking about the stakes that were at play in our administration and, of course, in the election.”
It was ‘counterproductive’ to downplay Harris’ achievements
Harris wasn’t blind to the way she was handled by presidential staffers—but she didn’t understand the full extent until after the election.
Stories spread, especially of how White House employees didn’t protect her against media attacks despite having the ability to do so. In her new book, 107 Days, Harris wrote that staff were “adding fuel” to negative narratives. In fact, she felt the president’s inner circle seemed “fine with it” and that she should be “knocked down” a bit more.
“It was clear to me in terms of just the challenges with getting them to uplift, getting them to defend, especially when there were inaccurate, unfair attacks,” Harris said. “To the extent that the vice president is being attacked, resources were available but not used to defend the vice president in the way that they could have.”
Harris drew the conclusion that staffers were holding her back in an effort to set Biden up to win his second election. But when he dropped out of the running just four months shy of the U.S. presidential voting day, Harris was rushed to pick up the pieces. She waged her campaign as the Democratic nominee, but lost out to sitting President Trump. The damage from Biden’s inner circle suppressing her achievements and letting negative narratives run wild was done.
In other words, success isn’t a limited resource—it’s a pie big enough for everyone to get a slice. Now, the Democratic Party has learned that lesson the hard way. “It was counterproductive,” Harris concluded. “We rose and fell together.”
CEOs agree that it takes a village to be successful
Harris isn’t the only leader who believes success should be shared, not sequestered to one person. In a visit to his alma mater, Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained his leadership philosophy: don’t focus on being the only winner, and uplift others around you.
“As a leader, a lot of your job is to make [employees] successful,” Pichai said in 2022. “It’s less about trying to be successful [yourself], and more about making sure you have good people and your work is to remove that barrier, remove roadblocks for them so that they can be successful in what they do.”
Indra Nooyi, former CEO of $200 billion giant PepsiCo, also relies on people as her superpower. She dispels the myth that leaders can reach new heights of success all by themselves—it takes a village to get there.
“Looking at your people as assets, not tools for the trade, are going to be the only successful elements of the formula for the future,” Nooyi said on a podcast earlier this year with Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “People are going to make you successful. You can’t do it all yourself.
