At lunch with a potential client recently, he said something interesting: "Every mistake that is made in my company is ultimately my fault, and yet every win is accredited to me too. It's a weird dynamic, because neither side of this equation is accurate and yet both sides — at least in the public eye — are true." As the CEO of a team of 15 team members, I immediately got what he was saying and realized it's part of my daily role.

Think about it: The ground-shattering advancements of Apple have historically been attributed to just Steve Jobs. When Tesla stock goes down, it's all Elon Musk's fault. And when people think "Amazon," they think "Jeff Bezos" — no other name at all except Bezos. The space heater that didn't arrive the day it was supposed to? Bezos better get on that!

But of course, none of this is the case, is it? No single business owner, whether they have a team of 15, 1,500 or 15,000, can possibly be responsible for every single thing that goes on in the company, and they sure as heck aren't responsible for all the things that go right. And yet they're routinely assigned this burden. That's an awful lot of weight on the shoulders of leaders. How you carry it is up to you.

In my 15 years of running my own PR firm, I've been on both sides of this seesaw. I've sat on the side of a client singing my praises to the skies for a fundraiser that exceeded expectations, and I've also been harshly reprimanded by a client who was sorely disappointed by the lackluster results of their press release pickup. In the first instance, it was my events coordinator who chose the venue, the date, the band, everything; in the second, there's only so much you can do if the media is simply not at all interested........

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