Ownership is not a title

Nobody is coming to fix it. Own it. 

Ownership is not something that appears in a job description or gets assigned in a meeting. It is a decision. Available to everyone at every level. At any moment. The most junior person in the room can own something completely. The most senior person in the room can abdicate ownership entirely. The title does not decide. The person does.

A moral compass without ownership is just good intentions. Prediction without ownership is just accurate observation. Ownership is what turns thinking into doing. It is the decision to be the person responsible for the outcome, not just the person present while it happens.

This distinction matters more than most leaders acknowledge. Presence is easy. Accountability is not. The person who attends every meeting about a problem and the person who owns the problem are often two different people. The first is managing their involvement. The second is managing the outcome. Only one of them will be remembered when the outcome arrives.

Ownership also does not require permission. The most powerful form of ownership is the kind that is taken before anyone asks for it, before the gap becomes visible, before the crisis makes the decision for everyone. This is the form of ownership that builds the kind of credibility no title can manufacture and no competitor can easily replicate.

Key Takeaway: Ownership is a decision, not a title. It is available to everyone at every level and does not require permission. The person who takes ownership before being asked builds credibility that the person who waits for assignment never achieves.

Ownership is not something that gets assigned in a meeting. It is a decision. Available to everyone. At any moment.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 1: The Individual · Philosophy 3: Own It · Section: Ownership is not a title

MarvinPro | November 2025

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Own the failure

Ownership is total. There is no selective ownership.

Anyone can own a success. The project that delivered. The team that hit the target. The initiative that worked. When things go well everyone moves toward the result. Ownership of success is easy and it means very little.

Real ownership shows itself when something goes wrong. The leader who stands in front of the failure, who does not redirect blame to the team, the budget, the circumstances or the timing, is the person people trust with the next big thing. Not because they never fail. Because when they do they own it completely.

This is also where ownership and the moral compass meet. Distancing yourself from failure is the comfortable choice. Owning it is the right one. And the leader who consistently makes the right choice, even when it costs them something, builds a reputation for accountability that no amount of successful projects can manufacture on its own.

Owning the failure also produces something that deflecting it never does. Learning. The leader who owns the failure investigates it, understands what went wrong and makes the changes needed to ensure it does not happen again. The leader who deflects it moves on unchanged, carrying the same gap into the next project.

Key Takeaway: Total ownership includes the failures. The leader who owns failure completely learns from it, builds trust through it and arrives at the next challenge more capable than the one who deflected it. Selective ownership is not ownership. It is performance.

Own the success quietly. Own the failure loudly. That is what accountability looks like.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 1: The Individual · Philosophy 3: Own It · Section: Own the failure

MarvinPro | November 2025

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The ownership cycle

Taking ownership of something is the beginning of a cycle, not a single act.

The first phase is learning. When you take full ownership of something the first thing that happens is you learn it. Not the surface. Not the summary. The detail. The edge cases. The things that break at the worst possible moment. The dependencies nobody wrote down. The informal workarounds the previous owner used that kept everything moving. You become the specialist. Not because you were trained. Because you owned it deeply enough that the knowledge had nowhere else to go.

The second phase is documentation. Everything you know written down, structured and transferable. Not because you are leaving. Because knowledge that lives only in one person's head is not an asset. It is a risk. Document it so someone else can own it after you. Document it so the organisation keeps the knowledge when you move on. Document it so you can take a holiday without everything falling apart.

The third phase is transfer. The knowledge moves from your head into the system, into the documentation, into the people who need to understand it. The work becomes less dependent on your presence. Others can operate it. Others can maintain it. Others can cover it when you are not there.

The final phase is the proof. There is a simple test for whether ownership is real or just dependency. Can you take a holiday? Not a working holiday. Not three days where you check your phone every hour. A real holiday. Disconnected. Present somewhere else. Unreachable for a week. If the answer is no the ownership cycle is not complete. The knowledge is still in your head rather than in the system. The process depends on your presence rather than on its own design.

When the system runs without you, when you can take a holiday and nothing falls apart, that is not the moment to let go. That is the moment to find the next thing that needs an owner.

Key Takeaway: The ownership cycle has four phases — learn it completely, document it fully, transfer it deliberately and prove it runs without you. The leader who completes the cycle builds something that outlasts their presence. The leader who stops at phase one builds a dependency.

Knowledge that lives only in one person's head is not an asset. It is a risk.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 1: The Individual · Philosophy 3: Own It · Section: The ownership cycle

MarvinPro | November 2025

marvinpro.com

Own the orphan

Every organisation has orphaned problems. The issue that falls between two departments. The process nobody designed. The customer complaint that does not fit any existing category. The gap everyone can see and nobody will touch because it does not appear in anyone's job description.

Most people walk past the orphan. It is not their problem. It is not their responsibility. It is not their risk. The calculation is simple and wrong — if it is not mine I do not need to own it.

The owner picks it up. Not because they were asked. Not because it is in their job description. Because they saw it and they knew that if they did not own it nobody would. And an unowned problem does not disappear. It grows. Quietly. Until it becomes a crisis that is everyone's problem at the worst possible time.

Owning the orphan is one of the highest value things a leader can do. It fills the gaps that organisations leave. It builds the kind of credibility that no job title can manufacture. It demonstrates a quality of judgment that separates the person who manages their own scope from the person who manages the organisation's outcomes.

The person who owns what nobody else will touch becomes the person the organisation cannot do without. Not because they made themselves indispensable by hoarding knowledge, but because they built something that did not exist before they arrived and documented it so thoroughly that it would survive after they left.

Own the orphan. Do it before anyone asks. Do it before it becomes a crisis. Do it because you can see what happens if you do not.

Key Takeaway: Orphaned problems grow when nobody owns them. The leader who picks them up before being asked builds credibility, fills gaps the organisation did not know how to close and consistently arrives at the next opportunity before the people who waited to be assigned.

An unowned problem does not disappear. It grows. Quietly. Until it becomes a crisis that is everyone's problem.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 1: The Individual · Philosophy 3: Own It · Section: Own the orphan

MarvinPro | November 2025

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A real example

In the first week of a new role as a service owner, a leader heard that a colleague starting at the same time would be going on maternity leave in three months. The colleague owned a separate service area. There was no plan for coverage. Nobody had been assigned to cover it. Nobody had asked anyone to cover it.

The leader did not wait to see if someone would handle it. In the first week, before anything else had been established, before the role itself was fully understood, the leader approached the colleague and proposed working together from day one. Sharing everything. Learning both areas simultaneously. So that by the time the maternity leave began, the transition would already be complete.

Three months later the colleague left. Her service area was not new to the leader. It had been running jointly for three months. Every stakeholder was already used to the leader being involved. The handover was not a handover. It was a continuation. The gap that should have formed did not form because it had been closed in week one.

For the year that followed the leader carried both service areas in full. Not as a temporary cover arrangement. As a full ownership responsibility on top of their own. The ownership cycle was applied to the colleague's area completely — learned, documented, run to the same standard as their own area, and ready to be returned intact when she came back.

By the time the colleague returned, the leader had also taken on a third area, insurance, which had been without a clear owner. The insurance ownership had come during the maternity cover period, added on top of an already doubled workload. It stayed after the colleague returned.

Throughout this period the leader's manager was consistently appreciative of the extra ownership taken on. The leader's response was not reluctance or resignation. It was gratitude. Every time additional responsibility was offered or made possible, the leader thanked the manager for the opportunity.

This was not performance. It was genuine. The extra work was not a burden. It was an investment in capability, in credibility and in the kind of influence that comes from being the person who owns what others do not. The manager understood this and continued to expand the scope as a result.

The others did the minimum. The minimum is safe, comfortable and invisible. The leader who does the minimum is never a problem. They are also never the person anyone thinks of when something important needs an owner.

The gap was visible in week one. That was early enough.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 1: The Individual · Philosophy 3: Own It · A real example

MarvinPro | November 2025

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Own It

See what needs to be done. Do it before anyone asks. Learn it completely. Document it fully. Transfer it deliberately. Prove it runs without you.

Own the success quietly. Own the failure loudly. Pick up what others walk past. Fill the gaps before they become crises. Build things that did not exist before you arrived and document them so thoroughly that they survive after you leave.

When extra responsibility is offered, be grateful. Not because the work is easy but because the opportunity is real. Every additional ownership is an investment in capability, credibility and influence that the person doing the minimum is not making.

When the system runs without you, that is not the moment to let go. That is the moment to find the next thing that needs an owner.

Nobody is coming to fix it. Own it.

The person who owns what nobody else will touch becomes the person the organisation cannot do without.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 1: The Individual · Philosophy 3: Own It · Chapter Outcome

MarvinPro | November 2025

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