Take Ownership
Accountability, decisiveness, and owning outcomes.
Why it matters
Accountability builds trust.
Ownership means more than just being responsible for your team's work. It means owning the business impact of technology decisions. It means standing behind your recommendations even when they don't work out. It means being the person who says, that was my call and here's what I learned from it.
What it looks like in practice
The opposite of ownership is blame. And blame is incredibly common in technology organisations. The requirements were unclear. The timeline was unrealistic. The other team didn't deliver their dependency. These might all be true, but an ownership mindset asks: what could I have done differently?
Decisive leadership doesn't mean making rash decisions. It means making timely decisions with the information available, communicating them clearly, and adjusting when new information arrives. The worst thing a technology leader can do is leave decisions unmade, creating a vacuum that gets filled with confusion and speculation.
How to develop this
Ownership also means being proactive. It's the difference between waiting to be asked for a technology strategy and presenting one. Between reacting to outages and building systems that prevent them. Between hoping the CEO understands technology's value and making that value visible.
The leaders who take ownership are the ones who move from order taker to impact maker. They don't wait for permission. They create the conditions for their team to succeed and take responsibility for the results.