The Pendulum Problem: How Extreme Ownership Can Turn You Into a Ghost
I once ran a team so tightly that they stopped thinking for themselves. Not because they were passive people, because I always had them wait for me. I've written before on accountability being core to how I operate. This extreme ownership means that I take 100% responsibility for my team's plans, our execution and especially our failutres. I learned the hard way that this very instinct has a failure mode nobody really warns you about.
Taking 100% responsibility for outcomes can, if you're not careful, start pulling you toward doing everything yourself. Not necesarrily as an active decision or out of malice, it just creep ins. The thought process is: Since the outcome is mine, I need to be close to every decision. And then you look up one day and realize your team is sitting back waiting for your input on everything
Taking an attitude of extreme ownership can rob the team of initiatives to own themselves and set the dangerous precedent of steering everything yourself. When I tried to run everything, the team would sit back and wait for my decision. A general feeling of lethargic passiveness set in. I didn't realize it, but my extreme ownership lead to an extreme disempowerment.
When ownership quietly turns into micromanagement
The conviction "I am fully responsible for this team's outcomes" and the behavior "I need to be in every decision" feel like the same thing when you're inside it. But there's an important difference between being accountable for outcomes and controlling the path to them.
When I was running everything, the team's default shifted from proactive to reactive. They sat on issues until I weighed in. Nobody was being lazy - they had simply never been given any real reason to act independently, because I'd quietly taken that space for myself. I had created extreme dependency.
Micro-managing doesnt work because no single person can overlook multiple people operating in multiple dynamic environments. With too much control, people dont act with any traces of initiative.
The overcorrection
Once you recognize this pattern, the obvious move is to pull back. Which is exactly what I did, and it also went wrong.
Giving people autonomy without giving them clarity on where you're heading is not empowerment, but just a different kind of failure. The team worked hard and with good intentions, but we started pulling in different directions. There was no shared direction, which you notice slowly and then all at once. I had confused disappearing with trusting, and the consequences were mine to own just the same.
Both failure modes came from the same misunderstanding. Micromanagement confuses ownership with control. Laissez-faire leadership confuses ownership with absence. The pendulum had swung from one wrong extreme to the other, and I was responsible for both.
And this is where the real danger of both extremes converges. You are not building a high-performing team, but building a team where performance ties back to an individual. You haven't institutionalized performance. You've made it dependent on a single person or on favorable conditions, which is very fragile.
A tight-loose-tight mindset
The tight-loose-tight (TLT) model from Rune Ulvnes resonates with me for how well it juxtaposes the two sides of the spectrum, and has helped me calibrate the degree of my involvement. TLT proposes that leaders be deeply involved at the beginning and at the end of initatives. At the beginning to sharply define the scope and the "why" and at the end to review the "what" and affirm it's connection to the original intent. The "loose" phase is where you genuinely step back and give the team autonomy in finding the "how". In other words: define the problem space and then decentralize command to the team.
Extreme ownership, properly understood, is being accountable for the conditions in which your team does their best work. Not doing the work for them, and not abandoning them either. The moment I understood that, the pendulum stopped swinging so violently.