The Most Important Thing That Leaders Own
Am I responsible for the outcomes? The work? The people? The conditions?
It's one of the most common lines of questioning I hear from leaders trying to understand and evolve their leadership. These questions shape where you focus your attention, the conversations you have, the nature of your one-on-ones. And the answers shape your identity as a leader, in work and in life: who you are, what you do, how you view yourself and your environment.
So let's take them one by one.
The Outcomes
Are you responsible for the outcomes? Depending on your role, it’s highly likely you're accountable for the outcomes. When there are specific targets to hit, you own your team's performance relative to them - the success or the failure. But responsibility is a little more nuanced. You might own specific actions leading up to an outcome, but there are always larger forces in play. Your team might be responsible for pieces of the work, and external forces might move you off target.
Accountability and responsibility are different things. You can be accountable to outcomes without being solely responsible for them. Accountability means answering for the result. Responsibility means owning the actions and conditions within your control.
The Work
Are you responsible for the work? For a new manager, this is one of the hardest shifts to make. For founders and new executive leaders, it is one of the most common pitfalls.
As an individual contributor or a solo founder, you were responsible for the work. You sat down and executed it. As a manager, you're responsible for something else, though it’s rarely the pen-to-paper work. If you're going to scale your leadership, you need your teams to be responsible for the work. Again, you’re likely accountable for its quality and alignment, but the work itself belongs to them.
This is the pitfall for founders especially. You built the company doing the work yourself. Now other people must be responsible for most of it. If you stay too involved in it, you may be withholding your team’s autonomy and ownership, stifling the people who you need to perform.
The People
Are you responsible for the people? In some ways, yes. If they work 8 hours a day, they spend half of their waking hours with you. They look to your organization for clarity and support, for investment into their careers and lives. The performance of the business has a direct bearing on their wellbeing at work and in their lives.
What you’re not responsible for are their thoughts, their emotions, and their actions.
Some leaders find it hard to establish boundaries and not take on people’s baggage or stress, and others underappreciate how big of an impact they have on the people around them.
The Conditions
So what are you actually responsible for? The conditions people work within. The space you create for your team, inside your organization.
Every person needs clear expectations. Every person is going to run into challenges and needs the support and tools to work through them. Some of that they'll bring themselves. Some of it needs to come from you and your leadership.
How you structure and deliver support to your team is what you're responsible for.
People's feelings, actions, and attitudes belong to them. This is the trap I see empathetic leaders fall into most: taking on what isn't theirs. When someone's upset, it's tempting to feel like you need to fix it for them. Often that's not yours to fix.
What you own is the space you create. It’s your responsibility to create an environment where people can do good work. That includes clarity about priorities, the authority to make decisions, the resources to act, direct feedback, and a shared understanding of what good work looks like.
What the Space Around You Needs
Two things to consider:
Psychological safety and accountability. This is healthy collaboration in practice. People need to feel that they can speak up without fear of retribution, be themselves, share a half-formed thought, take a risk and fail without it costing them. The term is less used than it was, but the essence is critical.
Room to solve problems. When something goes wrong, do people feel equipped to work through it, do they shut down, do they come to you to fix it? If you solve everything for people, they'll keep bringing you everything. If you’re irritated or dismissive, they'll eventually stop telling you anything. Both are conditions you create, whether you mean to or not.
Where to Start
The four questions collapse into one practical move: audit the space you create.
Pick one person on your team. Ask yourself three things about the conditions you've created for them.
Are the expectations you've set explicit? And is there clear and consistent follow up?
What do your 1:1s look like? Tactical status update or curious and collaborative?
What happens when something is hard or half-formed? Do people say it, or do they avoid addressing it until it grows into something bigger or reaches a breaking point?
Would they agree if you asked them?
The answers can help you see where your attention has been pointed: the work, the outcomes, the people, or the conditions. The conditions are the one piece on this list that has always been, and will always be yours to own.
