Weak Leadership Revealed By "I" Instead of "We

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Jan 30, 2026 • 1 min read


One of the clearest signs of weak leadership is the use of “I” instead of “we”.

“I do not want to be in this situation. I do not want to face the consequences. I do not want any downtime.”

Now switch it to “we”:

“We do not want to be in this situation. We do not want to face the consequences. We do not want any downtime.”

That one word changes everything.

If your team only hears “I” when things go wrong, do not be surprised when they stop taking ownership.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses