[avgcorrection]

Of course this looks like the fruits of your leadership (“not to brag”) from your perspective. On the other hand it can look different from the other side when you see your peers jump at the opportunity to please the boss.

As long as one is the person with the authority in a relationship one cannot really know which option it is.

[absurddoctor]

There might be merit to this in general. But in this specific case the person is no longer in authority so it doesn’t seem to apply.

[tonyarkles]

Yeah, that was the part that really gave me pause. While there was always a clear "I'm the guy that you have to listen to" relationship when I ran the team, there wasn't ever, from what I could tell at least, any real attempt by anyone to try to suck up or anything. And now, they've got their own manager to try to suck up to if they want to, but the new guy seems to have a similar style as me (he was the senior-most person on the team when I left).

The other piece is that this team has done this kind of stuff in the past for each other. As an example, one guy blew a timing belt on the highway about 150km out of the city (on Sunday night coming back to town for work Monday morning). Two of the other people on the team loaded up tools into their truck and drove out to meet him, try to see if they could fix the car on the side of the road, and when they realized they couldn't they towed it away from the road and gave him a ride back to town.

I mean, I could be misreading this, but it seems like I, without really knowing what I was doing, put together a really tightly gelled team that jumps at the opportunity to help each other out. And in the process, I guess I got to be a part of that even after I left.