The Ownership Trap

In healthy corporate cultures, individuals feel a sense of ownership for their actions, their technologies, their products, and their company. Engineering teams have a sense of “ownership” for their services, their customer experience, their costs, their dates, and their commitments.

Focus on ownership to the exclusion of leadership is a trap. Ownership can exist without leadership. Ownership without leadership leads to bunker mentalities -- boundary infighting, failure to consider the customer, and a lack of vision and forward momentum.

A heavy focus on ownership can unintentionally lead to an under-emphasis on leadership. In particular, there is a difference between owning something tangible -- a technology, a service, a host, a roadmap and owning a space. A team might perceive themselves as owning “Oracle deployments” instead of seeing themselves as owning “Relational data usage at the company.” They might see themselves as responsible for owning a metric like “number of pager events” rather than owning “end-user service availability”. This slight definitional difference requires the individual to consider customer communication in the event of a service outage as part of what they own.

Owners often feel accountable for their tactical deliverables and commitments. Owners must clearly articulate boundaries in support of ownership clarity and effective separation of concerns. Owners must focus on the here-and-now realities.

Leaders naturally think about their service in the broader context. They are looking for opportunities by which their technology or business service continues to grow and increase in scope and value. They are focused on best-of-breed.

Leaders aren’t worried so much about in-scope or out-of-scope and are focused on doing-the-right-thing. They use ownership to make sure accountability, commitment, and clarity exist, but don’t use ownership as a way to segment themselves from the rest of the organization.

Leaders think less about roles & responsibilities and more about making sure they do the right thing for the customer. Clarity of roles & responsibilities are necessary for project execution efficiency, but they are a means to an end, not an end result in and of themselves.

Leaders naturally seek to expand their service footprint. They actively consult with customers, vendors, and peer teams trying to find the best solution. They are proactive rather than reactive. They view transparency as a key to success and black-box encapsulation as a limitation to thinking broadly.

Leaders seek out opportunity for impact. They view a new customer as an opportunity rather than a burden. They view tools for driving cross-organizational change as an opportunity to help get involved and lead the entire organization, rather than as an affront to their autonomy.

Leaders communicate passionately. Status, demos, presentations aren’t distractions but are vehicles to affect positive change and get feedback.

There is a leadership trap too. Leaders who fail to feel a strong sense of ownership are like a gust of wind or a crashing wave; they can cause excitement, but their impact, if any, is short-term. Leaders who push ownership elsewhere lose their effectiveness over time as their credibility wears away.

Strong owners commit. They feel accountable for success or failure. They feel accountable to dates and deadlines. They feel responsible for long-term manageability and maintenance even for spaces that they do not directly own. Without this sense of ownership, leadership is not lasting.

The best leaders are owners and the best owners are leaders.