The Confidence to Celebrate Others
What a beauty founder's generous gesture can teach us about authentic leadership
On a rainy autumn afternoon, I was scrolling through Instagram Reels when one made me stop. It came from Violette Serrat, the French makeup artist and founder of VIOLETTE_FR, whose Reels are always worth watching for tips and tricks. This one was different.
She was enthusiastically recommending lip balms from another well-loved brand, Danessa Myricks Beauty. Nothing unusual about that, you might think, until you know that lip balm is one of Violette's own most popular products.
VIOLETTE_FR, founded in 2021, has built its identity around a philosophy to complete, not compete. She has described it as a product principle, filling gaps in the market rather than copying what already exists. Watching her praise a competitor's product so warmly and naturally, in a category where she very much does compete, I felt I was seeing that philosophy reach further.
What struck me was not the lip balm. It was the confidence. One Reel cannot tell us everything about what lies behind a person's choices, but it left me thinking about something I suspect many leaders will recognise: how hard it can be to celebrate someone whose success sits close to our own.
Why it is harder than it looks
Celebrating someone else's success is easy when it costs us nothing. It becomes harder when their success touches our own ambitions: when a peer is praised for the kind of work we want to be known for, or a competitor wins the client we were hoping for. In those moments, admiration and a pang of envy can sit side by side. Mixed feelings are human, and authentic leadership has never required us to be free of them. What matters is that we notice them and choose how we respond.
What makes it difficult is that another person's success can quietly start to feel like a judgement on our own worth. If they are being recognised, perhaps we are falling behind.
Some opportunities are genuinely limited, of course. There is one promotion, one keynote slot, one client. Recognising others is different. Celebrating someone else's work rarely takes anything away from our own.
Confidence without comparison
Of course, it may be easier to praise a competitor’s lip balm when your own is selling well. Generosity can come more naturally when we feel we have little to lose. But perhaps that is exactly the point. The more secure we are in what we bring, the less another person’s success feels like a threat.
Confidence does not come from believing we are better than others. It comes from knowing that someone else can be brilliant without making us any less capable, valuable or deserving.
In strengths-based work, I see how much this security depends on knowing what we bring. When we understand our own strengths and the particular value we add, another person’s talent becomes easier to admire, because it no longer feels like a verdict on ours. A colleague’s brilliance at presenting does not cancel out our gift for building trust or seeing the bigger picture. The question shifts from who is best to what each of us contributes, and that is a far more generous place to lead from.
What this looks like at work
The same choice appears in everyday working life, usually less visibly than in an Instagram Reel. Imagine a colleague whose idea moved a project forward in a meeting where we were hoping to be noticed ourselves. Acknowledging their contribution, clearly and by name, costs us a moment of attention. Or imagine being asked whom to recommend for an opportunity we would also like. Suggesting the person best suited to it, even when that is not us, is a small act, but a revealing one.
Adam Grant's research for Give and Take adds a useful nuance. Generous people appear among both the least and the most successful, and what tends to separate them is whether they also look after their own goals. In other words, celebrating others need not come at the expense of our own ambitions. And over time, this kind of generosity builds trust, because people can see that we value more than our own achievements.
One generous act does not make someone a generous leader, though. The pattern does: whether we share credit, recommend people when they are not in the room and celebrate a colleague's achievement even when we wished it had been ours.
Room for more than one
What I liked about Violette's recommendation was its simplicity. She did not make a grand statement about collaboration. She shared something she genuinely appreciated, and in doing so showed that recognising someone else's work and standing firmly behind your own are not in conflict. Judging by the comments, many of her followers seemed to respect her even more for it.
That, for me, is one of the quiet strengths of authentic leadership. We can pursue our own ambitions fully and still be glad when others succeed. Often, a sincere acknowledgement is enough.
Complete, not compete is more than a brand philosophy. It is a choice we can practise in how we lead, how we collaborate and how we make room for others.
Perhaps there is someone whose work you could celebrate this week.
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