“Ownership” is a common theme among entrepreneurs right now, and I’ve had a recent experience that put it into perspective for me.
Data Disaster Strikes
Just a few weeks ago, we lost a significant amount of data that included software in development, live software (SaaS), databases, and more. At the time, I remember the news being delivered on a Saturday evening, and for about 10 seconds I felt a bit numb, but then quickly understood my role. You can read more about that in this article here.
Ever since that incident, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I’ve developed my instincts, and why they matter to my business and people. Here are some reasons that I think taking “ownership” is one of the most important things any leader can do.
Why Owning it Matters
My current stand is that everything that happens in my organization is my fault. Not because that’s the trendy topic for entrepreneurs lately, but because it’s always been the only way that I know how to move forward. Responsibility is one of the most important foundations of any business, and collapse can have huge consequences.
Because the blame game is contagious. It’s easy to frame anything so it’s not your fault. The blame could have gone in a number of directions. Once you’ve decided it’s not your fault, your mind is only too happy to help you justify it by any connection possible. That’s healthy if you want to vent for an afternoon, but if you let it affect your leadership, you can completely destroy your company.
If you’re making a connection to blame someone else, they can easily make a connection to yet another person. If you constantly try to blame other people, it can bleed down the entire company to become culture. I think most people, at different times in their lives, have worked in paranoid teams where everyone was constantly blaming one another because no one would take responsibility for the amount of dysfunction that was constantly causing problems. That starts with poor leadership.
Because the blame game costs money. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition if something goes wrong at my company. That’s because I’ve had to fight for as lean and efficient an organization as I could to survive my early years. I quickly learned that the company equivalent of congressional hearings is something I couldn’t afford.
Drama causes delays. Actual assignments get put off when people are trying to justify decisions instead of making corrective ones. That’s bad, and I certainly don’t need drama among my people, who already face enough challenges coordinating as a mobile team. I choose to own problems because I need to keep our direction relentlessly forward and owning every problem, as a rule, makes that easy.
Real simple: if we were going to get back on our feet, there was no time for blame.
Because you’re going to have to live with the consequences anyway. When something bad happens in your company, you have a problem. When to decide to make it into a spiralling blame game, you have a second problem, if not several to dozens more as the consequences alienate your team and slow you down. Choose to live with only one problem by choosing to make it yours.
Search your policy, communications and expectations for the place YOU could have improved. Could you have had a stronger policy in place? Could you have made something a priority that you didn’t? Is this problem likely to happen in other parts of the company or at a different time?
Move Forward
None of this is to say that you can’t make the decisions that you need to. I’m choosing not to blame the vendor, but that doesn’t mean I’m storing data with them again. I’m not blaming any of my employees, but I’m changing our duties and standards to make people accountable. The important thing is that we’ve made a choice not be paralyzed by this problem and that choice started with me choosing to take responsibility.
