High Ownership, High Urgency

The two defining characteristics of the coworkers I enjoy working with most are ownership and urgency.

Ownership

For the last 40+ years, my mom has owned and operated a beauty supply store. She is my hero in so many ways. Born into an extremely impoverished family in war-torn South Korea, she was the youngest of six siblings during a period of widespread instability and economic devastation. As the youngest child and a woman in a patriarchal society, there was limited time or money for schooling beyond a secondary education. Eventually she married, moved to the States, had children and tried various small businesses until she opened a small beauty supply store over 40 years ago. She is self made and self taught in every sense of the term: language, culture, and business. And her devotion to her store – 10 hours a day x 6-7 days a week x 40 years – made our lives possible.

I grew up as latchkey kid, coming home to an empty house after school, mostly microwaving myself Bagel Bites / cans of Chef Boyardee, playing SEGA and not answering the phone or the door. My mom was almost never at my little league baseball or basketball games, unless they were serendipitously scheduled on the one day off she sometimes had per week. I didn’t bemoan this - she made sure I felt her love everyday. It was simply a fact of life: the sky is blue, grass is green, and umma (“mom” in Korean) is at work.

Roughly ten years ago there was a family first birthday scheduled on a Saturday at 11am. In Korean culture a baby’s first birthday is a significant cultural milestone, its importance falling somewhere between the American customs of a Sweet Sixteen and a wedding (closer to the latter than the former).

My mom’s reaction was immediate:

I can’t make it. 11am Saturday? I have to work.

There were some temporarily hurt feelings and attempts at rationalization, but she remained resolute in her stance, almost surprised at the backlash of what she deemed obvious. I had heard “I have to work” so many times in my own childhood, unable to formulate a rebuttal due to insufficient age and life experience. But I was an adult now - gainfully employed and married - so I asked her:

I don’t get it - why do you always have to work? What’s the big deal if you miss a few hours of work on a Saturday for this birthday party? Don’t you have an employee or two that can cover for you? Why do you care so much about being at the store all the time?¹”

And her response, said as a passing comment, has stuck with me to this day:

I am the owner of this store. Employees come and go, but they are not the owner. I am the only one responsible for what happens here, and it’s important I am around to take that responsibility. When the owner is not around, things are not the same.

My context/privilege² is very different than my mom’s. I’m not really here to debate my mom’s idea of work-life balance, nor would I necessarily make the same decision. But in the thousands of conversations I’ve had with her over my lifetime, this is one conversation that I find myself revisiting. Both because it helps me better understand her lived experience, and because I find it increasingly relevant to my own life as a son, husband, father, and manager.

Ownership at work

It’s common to see “we act like owners” on a company’s careers page or list of values, but it’s a lofty aphorism without concrete direction. Nor does ownership necessarily prescribe a set of values or behaviors; there are many terrible dog owners and homeowners. When I think of true “ownership,” I prefer my mom’s definition: “within the scope of what I can control, and in the good and bad, I am ultimately accountable.”

There are a lot of mechanisms by which a sense of ownership can dissolve in organizations:

• “Stakeholder management”: a “polite,” formal-sounding, likely templated email/slack message that communicates how an urgent request has been heard and will be triaged during a sprint planning meeting two weeks from now;
• “We don’t own this”: common during incident triage, the practice of hot potato-ing accountability until someone realizes the team that owns the broken system was re-org’d out of existence six months ago;
• “It’s the vendors fault”: the sibling to “we don’t own this.”

To be fair, these reasons can be real, and sometimes there are limited options to pursue when a vendor in the critical path is on fire. But I’ve experienced many more situations where reality is much less black and white, and with some thought and effort there is in fact an alternative or workaround to pursue. But teams or individuals absolve themselves of responsibility by blaming various unaccountable parties: circumstances, topology, priorities, “the org.”

But I’ve also noticed that some people - ICs and managers alike - don’t do that. They face the same blockers but approach them as obstacles, not outcomes. These people are often the most effective operators at their level, and uniquely seem to get more done and are more widely respected as teammates. The difference is they operate as owners.

Owners don’t have the luxury of wiping their hands of responsibility due to circumstances. Owners push forward with the additional step of identifying solutions, which in the absence of clear steps forward (i.e. formal lines of ownership aside, just fixing the damn thing themselves), means communicating pragmatic, potentially unpalatable alternatives:

• Here’s what we need to know or do to address this;
• Here are the inevitable tradeoffs we’ll need to make to prioritize this over other things;
• Here’s why I think this is, or is not, worth it.

The more I progress in my career, and the more I interface with executives, the more I’m convinced this is ultimately what senior leaders want. No matter what track you’re on, in response to an ask don’t simply tell them “no” or that something isn’t possible - read the room of how important an ask is, triage it against any existing priorities and processes, and bring them alternatives by which that ask can get done and the tradeoffs involved. And in the circumstances when you are truly blocked - you’ve racked your brain for alternatives, and there are none available at your scope - ask for help. Walk them through what you’ve tried and why. These are the foundations of building trust and delegated authority.

I once read that “the best way to learn to be an owner is to act like an owner.” I think that’s good advice. For the job you ultimately want, I think it’s hard to suddenly “turn on” behaviors you’ve never demonstrated before. The less obvious instincts and behaviors that make ICs and leaders great - the smells, the triangulation of incentives and personalities, the ability to drive conversations to resolutions, the courage to push through friction - can only be learned by doing. The learning is in the reps. The fastest way to get better at being the owner you aspire to become - Cofounder, C-suite executive, Head of Department, Distinguished Engineer - is to act like an owner today.

I’ll often ask a guiding question to explore this idea in 1:1s: “Forget your title, the org, and your boss. Tomorrow you’re appointed as the CEO/CTO - what would you do here?” I like this question because it takes people through the mental exercise of breaking out of perceived organizational constraints.

Urgency

The corollary to ownership is urgency. “Urgency” in this context is not the need to meet an external time-based standard³, but rather the need to meet an internal quality standard. In practice they’re often correlated - high urgency people often execute tasks quickly - but it’s not because speed is the goal. It’s because knowing a suboptimal thing exists annoys them into fixing it as soon as possible.

One of my favorite parts of Hamilton is during Non-Stop, when Aaron Burr delivers a commentary on Alexander Hamilton’s contribution to The Federalist Papers:

Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays defending the new United States Constitution, entitled The Federalist Papers. The plan was to write a total of twenty-five essays, the work divided evenly among the three men. In the end, they wrote eighty-five essays, in the span of six months.

John Jay got sick after writing five.

James Madison wrote twenty-nine.

Hamilton wrote the other FIFTY-ONE!

How do you write like you’re running out of time?…

Alexander Hamilton didn’t write 51 Federalist papers because he needed everyone to celebrate his pace of work relative to his peers. He wrote 51 Federalist Papers because that’s what it took to accomplish his actual goal, which was to ratify the US Constitution. And if his peers wrote 34 and the end state required 85, well… that means he had to write 51. The volume of work was incidental to the outcome.

How often in the course of work is this true? You set out with nominal acceptance criteria - “25 essays” - and in practice the delivery of the ultimate outcome balloons to significantly more work. Urgency is the impulse that carries the most effective operators through to the end of a road, regardless of how long that road is.

In practice I find that high urgency individuals often share a similar trait: they’re optimistically dissatisfied. “This could be better, and I have the skills to see how, and I’m going to drive it forward to my own high standards of what ‘good’ looks like.” And it’s not because that better state is solely contingent upon the next rung on the career ladder, or their bosses’ opinion, or acceptance criteria in a Jira ticket. The drive is internal: if something could be better, why shouldn’t it be better? If something could be faster, why shouldn’t it be faster? If you’re going to put your name on something, why wouldn’t it be the best version of what you can do? What’s the point in doing this if we’re not going to do it as well as we can?

Caring, enough

While these traits are powerful drivers of impact, urgency and ownership are a double-edged sword. On the positive side there’s the impetus to aspire, try new processes, and push towards better outcomes. On the negative side, when outcomes aren’t what you expect or want, frustration can boil over into complacency, cynicism, disengagement, and ultimately burnout. How do you care enough to drive a system to a better state, but not care so much that your mental state is solely contingent on the results?

For me, it’s taking a hard look at recognizing what I can control and what I can’t. And the scope of what I can control includes (1) my inputs, or the work I put in, and (2) my sphere of influence (teams/managers under my remit). If I’m happy with my inputs within my sphere of influence, I’ve operated well as an owner.

Footnotes