Extreme Ownership Is Bigger Than Saying “I Own My Part”

One of the books I recommend fairly often when I'm talking about leadership is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. There are a lot of lessons in it that have stayed with me, but the one I probably come back to most is the idea that ownership has to extend further than simply acknowledging the part of a problem that can be directly traced back to you.

That's relatively easy to do, especially once you've been in leadership for a while and you've learned the language of accountability. Something goes wrong and we say we should have communicated better, followed up sooner, or made our expectations clearer. We acknowledge our piece, everyone agrees that we've taken responsibility, and then we move on.

There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, but I've come to believe that real ownership requires us to follow the chain quite a bit further.

If I'm leading a group of people and someone on my team makes a decision that produces a poor outcome, that person obviously has some responsibility for the decision they made. I'm not suggesting that leadership means removing individual accountability or finding a way to blame yourself for every mistake someone else makes. What I am saying is that if they're my people, their decision also gives me an opportunity to look at everything that happened before they reached that moment.

Did they have the training they needed? Did they understand what I was trying to accomplish, or did I simply give them a set of instructions and assume they understood the intent behind them? Had we talked through what authority they had to make a decision when the situation changed? More importantly, had I created enough trust that they would feel comfortable telling me they didn't understand something before it became a problem?

Those questions became particularly important to me in the fire service because there are plenty of situations where the person in charge can't possibly make every decision. You need people who understand the larger objective well enough to operate when circumstances change, and if you've done a good job preparing them, there are going to be times when they make a decision that isn't exactly the one you would have made.

That doesn't automatically mean they were wrong.

Sometimes leadership means standing behind someone who made a reasonable decision with the information they had, even when the outcome wasn't what any of you wanted. Other times, the outcome exposes a legitimate gap in someone's training or judgment, and then part of your responsibility is to address it. What I've become much less comfortable with is the leader who looks at a bad outcome, identifies the person closest to the mistake, and assumes the analysis is finished.

That's usually where ego gets involved.

It's much easier to explain why someone underneath you failed than to trace the problem backward and discover that you didn't prepare them particularly well, that your expectations weren't nearly as clear as you thought they were, or that something about the environment you created contributed to the decision.

I've had to do that kind of examination myself, and it isn't particularly enjoyable. There are times when I've realized that the thing I was frustrated with someone else for doing was at least partly the result of something I had failed to do earlier.

That doesn't make their decision mine, but it does make the environment surrounding that decision part of my responsibility.

I think that's where ownership becomes considerably more useful than blame. Blame is mostly interested in identifying where the failure occurred and who should answer for it. Ownership can certainly include accountability, but it keeps going. It asks what needs to change in the training, communication, expectations, systems, or leadership so that we're less likely to create the same outcome again.

For me, that's the part worth carrying forward.

If I'm going to lead people, I don't get to claim responsibility only for their successes and then distance myself from their failures. I have to be willing to look at the entire chain of events and understand where my decisions, or sometimes my lack of decisions, influenced what happened.

That's a much more demanding version of ownership than simply saying, "I own my part."

I also think it's the version that gives us the best chance of getting better.

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