Be their shit umbrella
On this week's Senior Mindset Mastermind, we talked about what ownership and leadership mean to you. And I weaved why they're the impactfulest feature you can add to your career through the conversation.
Lots of great ideas! Daniel L's "shit umbrella" suggestion was my favorite. Resonates with Simon Sinek's Why Leaders Eat Last talk.
Sinek likes to add a bunch of mumbo jumbo about smartphones and hormones and distraction because that's his spiel. My take is that leaders go to bat for their team. That's it.
When you're there for your team, your team will be there for you. And that's what makes a team.
Ownership
The way you go to bat for your team is ownership. At all levels.
"What can I do to improve this situation?"
That mantra is the core lesson from Jocko Wilink's interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast. A great ownership 101 overview.
Part of ownership is adopting a finisher's mentality. Your work isn't done until it's done done.
Did you think of every edge case? Did you generalize the ask to every situation? Did you follow up and get reviews? Did you get it to production or scheduled for deploy? Did you follow up and made sure it's deployed? Did you ask if it proved useful? Did you ...
And don't let work in progress pile up. Finish. WorkInProgress kills your progress
The perfect steak dinner sitting on the counter without potatoes[1] serves no-one. The customer stays hungry.
Be The Expert
I don't have a good catchphrase for this yet, but another part of ownership is to Be The Expert. You know the problem best. You know the codebase. You've been thinking about this detail longer than anyone else.
Help them solve the problem. Don't just be a pair of hands.
And the more of that you do, the more responsibility and ownership gloms on to you. Automatically. You won't even have to ask.
I think this mentality is the secret behind Silicon Valley success. Distributed ownership. Everyone owns their piece of the story.
Further reading
Extreme Ownership and Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Great books, I enjoyed them on audio.
Goes into way more detail ✌️
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: in case it isn't obvious, ownership and responsibility are where the big bux and fun challenges are hiding :)
[1] I actually eat steak with just salad, it's a metaphor