be encouraged

Ownership as a Leader

I have a personal purpose statement. Not a mission statement. Not a vision statement. Something more personal than either of those.

Mine is simple: I help make things better. Places, problems, people. Or said another way, to make things better than I found them.

The idea is that wherever I show up, I want to leave the people and places better than they were before I arrived.

It sounds noble. And I believe it. But let me tell you where it shows up in the most unglamorous way possible.

The used K-Cup in the Keurig®.

You know the one. Someone made their coffee, and they leave the used K-Cup in the machine. Not in the trash. Not even close to the trash. Just… there. Waiting for someone else to deal with it.

I’ve caught myself more than once wanting to ask, out loud, to no one in particular: Why are you expecting someone else to throw that away for you?

And then I realized. That moment is actually a pretty honest picture of what ownership looks like, or doesn’t look like, at every level of leadership. It’s not always dramatic. It’s not always high stakes. But it’s always a choice. Either you complete the thing, or you leave it for someone else and tell yourself it wasn’t really your job.

That’s the heart of what I want to talk about in this post.

What Ownership Actually Means

Ownership in leadership gets talked about a lot. But I think it often gets confused with effort. Or even caring.

“She really cares about this project” and “she’s taking ownership of this project” can sound like the same thing. They’re not. You can care deeply about something and still leave it unresolved, unclear, or incomplete, especially when things get hard or go sideways. Caring is a starting point. Ownership is what you do with it.

Real ownership is completion, clarity, and follow-through.

It’s not about how busy you are. It’s not about how many emails you sent or how many meetings you attended or how late you stayed. It’s about whether the thing actually got done, whether the people around you have clarity on where things stand, and whether you followed through until the issue was actually resolved.

Not until it was handed off. Not until it felt like someone else’s problem. Until it was actually resolved.

That’s a high bar. It’s supposed to be.

The Default Move vs. The Stronger Move

Here’s where I want to get practical, because ownership is easy to agree with and hard to practice.

No one is slow to claim ownership when things go well. When the deal lands, the project is a success, the team delivers, or the outcome is better than what everyone hoped for… ownership feels great. Everyone wants a piece of it. The tension is what you do when things don’t go well. Few people are raising the hand of ownership when the outcome falls short. When it goes sideways in a way you didn’t see coming. That’s when ownership as a leader isn’t optional. That’s when it becomes everything.

When pressure builds and complexity increases, most of us have a default move or reaction. It might look like:

• We explain (or justify) the difficulty.
• We do more of the same, just…more, and harder than before.
• We stay busy enough that our effort is visible, even when the outcome isn’t moving.

And none of that is dishonest. The difficulty is real. The actions were taken. The effort is genuine. But effort without completion isn’t ownership. It’s participation.

The stronger move looks different.

The stronger move names what is known, defines what happens next, makes ownership visible, and follows through until the issue is actually closed. Rather than “I sent an email to follow up, and I’m waiting to hear back.” The behavior of ownership sounds more like: “Here’s where the situation stands. Here’s what I’m doing next. Here’s the risk if we don’t get movement.”

That’s the difference between tracking work and driving it to completion.

James Clear wrote something that I keep coming back to: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

Every time you complete the thing, you’re voting. Every time you leave the K-Cup for someone else, you’re voting. The votes add up. Over time, they become your reputation. And reputations are built, not in the big moments, but in the accumulation of small ones.

Ownership and the People You Serve

Ownership isn’t just about outcomes. It’s about what you leave behind in the people you serve.

Think about the leaders who have had the most impact on you. Chances are, they didn’t just deliver results. They left you better. More capable. More confident. More equipped for what came next. That’s a different kind of ownership. It’s not just closing the loop on a project. It’s asking whether the people around you are growing because of how you led.

Robert Greenleaf, the father of servant leadership, challenged leaders to ask whether the people they serve are growing. Are they, “… wiser, freer…more likely themselves to become servants?” That question reframes ownership entirely. There is an emphasis on who we become in the process and how we influence those around us.

Simon Sinek put it this way, “Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.”

Ownership, at its best, is an act of care. It says, “I’m not going to leave this unresolved,” or “I’m not going to leave you without clarity.”

Your Turn

Before you move on to the next thing today, here’s what I’d ask you to consider:

Where in your work right now are you tracking something instead of driving it? Where are you explaining or justifying the difficulty instead of owning the solution? And where, if you’re honest, have you been leaving K-Cups for someone else to deal with?

Ownership starts small. It starts with the next decision, the next conversation, the next moment where you could complete the thing or hand it off.

Vote for the leader you want to become.

Be Encouraged.

This is Part 2 of a series on Becoming Good at Growth. If you missed Part 1, you can find it here. Next up: Communication as a leader and why it’s the operating system of everything we do.