Leadership and Ownership

Leadership and Ownership

Step 1 of 12

askeddid you finish it?

Most leadership questions are not about managing anyone. Authority is optional.

The Idea

Most leadership questions are not asking whether you managed anyone. They ask whether you noticed something broken outside your ticket, got other people to care, and stayed with it until it was fixed. Noticing is cheap. Finishing is the signal.

Real-World Example

"I raised the flaky alert in standup" is where most answers stop. Continued: "Nobody owned the delivery-tracking pager, so it woke someone nightly and everyone had learned to ignore it. I spent two Fridays grouping alerts, deleted eleven that could never need a human, and put my name on the rota until the team took it back."

The Tradeoff

Reaching past your scope is also how you annoy the people whose work you just rewrote — ask them first, and say so in the story. Say "I" about your decisions and "we" about the work; an answer with no "we" reads as credit-taking.

Your turn

Put the steps in the right order.

1. 1Hand it to a named owner so it stops depending on you↑↓
2. 2Find the thing nobody owns and confirm it actually hurts someone↑↓
3. 3Do the unglamorous first slice yourself to prove it is fixable↑↓
4. 4Get agreement from the people whose work it touches↑↓

Check order

Mini quiz

1 / 3

A leadership story with no direct reports in it is:

• ANot acceptable
• BFine — influence without authority is the harder version
• COnly useful for junior roles
• DOff-topic