Building ownership requires relinquishing control
One of the most important components of effective technical leadership is providing teams the guidance that they need to completely own their products and processes. Ownership is possible only with a complete understanding of the team’s mission and their bounds of autonomy. It’s also the primary prerequisite for building a team that’s empowered and capable of improving itself. For higher-level leaders, the difference between guidance and control is subtle, and it’s surprisingly easy to find yourself on the wrong side of the line. It’s simple to say that your teams own their process, but it can be difficult to achieve such ownership in a meaningful way. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy.
There’s a natural conflict to navigate. Leaders want to be involved so that they can give input and make sure that things are done correctly, but they must also be allowing the space for teams to make mistakes that they can learn from. Encountering and navigating problems independently is an important element of the long-term team dynamic. Tools like cheat codes can help in specific situations, but true ownership requires a more consistent demonstration of the team’s agency over their decision making.
The hard truth that so many leaders don’t want to hear is that no team is going to be able to demonstrate real ownership over their domain until they’re given the space to do so. So long as a leader insists on keeping their hands in the low-level details, the team is not going to have the motivation to build that ownership. This is the cost of micromanagement: diminished creativity, a lack of agency and drive, slower overall progress, and eventually a complete demoralization of the team. Micromanagement applies not only at the level how how individual tasks are performed or where time is being spent, but can also be a problem when applied to how a team thinks and communicates.
For example, when working with newer leads, I often like to focus on behaviors that will result in the team “turning their brains off”. If the team is brainstorming ideas to solve a problem, and the lead cuts off the discussion with an immediate decision without providing enough context, they’re inherently disincentivizing such discussions from occuring in the future. Why would the team spend time thinking about creative ways to solve a problem when they’ve learned to expect a decision that doesn’t take their thoughts into account? Better just to wait for the decision rather than spending time thinking through a solution that’s just going to be thrown away.
A lead who fosters such discussion will eventually unlock the full potential of their team. A lead who shuts it down will create a room full of silent order-takers. Of course, no leader worth their salt would want a team dynamic like this, but it’s surprisingly easy to find yourself in a situation where you’ve inadvertently incentivized behaviors that you never intended to build within your teams.
If you believe you’ve reached the point where ownership is one of the main things holding your teams back from reaching their greatest potential, you would be well-served to think about investing in trust.
Trust is, in my opinion, the most important prerequisite for providing the space required for ownership. Ownership isn’t something that can simply be given to a group of people; rather, it must be actively taken. Part of the job of the leader is to build an environment that encourages their team members to want to take ownership in this way. Demonstrating to people that you trust them to make the best decisions that they can given the information that they have (and truly believing this yourself) is one of the most significant steps that can be taken towards building this feeling of real ownership.
There are many ways to build such an environment. None of them are easy. One of the simplest ways to get started is probably with something like Will Larson’s concept of identifying your controls, but even still this is only a launching point and not a complete solution. When heading down this path, you’ll have to reflect often. Ask yourself: are you solving problems for the team, or with the team? Are you acting as a guide, or are you steering from the back seat?
Trust is inherently fragile, and it’s a lot easier to lose it than it is to build it. A single misstep can undo months of work. You can’t fake it; the first step of demonstrating to a team that you trust them is to actually trust them. The role of a leader isn’t only to grant autonomy, but also to nuture and protect it. This requires restraint, patience, and most of all the willingness to let your teams learn from their own decisions.
One of the hardest parts of leadership is letting go. Once you learn to, that’s when you’ll see the real growth begin to happen.