There’s a sentence that stopped me in a recent conversation with Łukasz Łażewski, serial founder and someone who has built (and buried) more companies than most people ever pitch. He was in the middle of a rough patch. Key employee leaving. Product misfiring. Regulators in his inbox. He sat down with a group of other founders to vent. And when he finished, his friend David looked at him and said:
“Gosh. But you chose this.”
That’s it. That’s the whole sentence.
And it changed something. Not because it made the hard things disappear. But because it shifted where Łukasz was looking for the answer. Away from the circumstances. Back to himself.
I think about that a lot when I work with tech leaders.
The Complaint Pattern Nobody Talks About
Let me tell you about someone I’ll call Piotr. Engineering Manager, seven years in tech, running a cross-functional team in a fast-scaling SaaS company. Smart. Experienced. Technically brilliant.
Every session we had started the same way. The company didn’t give him enough resources. His stakeholders didn’t understand engineering. HR kept changing the rules. His team wasn’t motivated. The process was broken.
All of that might have been true. But here’s what was also true: Piotr hadn’t initiated a single difficult conversation in six months. He hadn’t pushed back on a single unrealistic deadline. He hadn’t told his team what he actually needed from them.
He was waiting for the situation to get better. And the situation was waiting for him to lead it.
This is the complaint pattern. It’s incredibly common in tech leadership. And it’s expensive.
According to a 2024 accountability study by the Talent Strategy Group, the average level of manager accountability across organizations sits at “only you know about your success or failure.” Not the team. Not the organization. Just you, privately. That’s not accountability. That’s invisibility dressed up as responsibility.
Why Tech Leaders Struggle With Ownership
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most leaders in technology were promoted because of what they could do alone. Write clean code. Architect systems. Solve hard problems. Solo performance was the metric that got you here.
And then suddenly you’re responsible for a team. For a roadmap. For someone else’s growth and someone else’s burnout. And the instinct, when things go wrong, is to look at those other people and ask: why aren’t they doing better?
That instinct is the problem.
Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership (recommended by Łukasz, and sitting on a lot of good leaders’ shelves for a reason) makes this exact point: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. When things go wrong, the first place to look is inward. Not to punish yourself. To find your part in it. Because your part is always there.
That’s not soft leadership theory. That’s a practical tool. When you locate your role in the problem, you also locate your power to change it.
Trust in managers has dropped from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. That number doesn’t fall because people are difficult. It falls because leadership behaviour has been inconsistent, reactive, and too often pointed outward.
What Ownership Actually Looks Like in Practice
Ownership isn’t about self-blame. It’s about self-direction. It’s asking: given this situation, what is the next best move I can make from here?
Here’s what it looks like in the day-to-day of leading a tech team:
- When a sprint fails: instead of “the requirements were unclear,” ask “what did I not clarify early enough?”
- When someone underperforms: instead of “they’re not motivated,” ask “what do I actually know about what motivates this person?”
- When a stakeholder is frustrated: instead of “they don’t understand engineering,” ask “how am I translating our work for them?”
- When your team is burning out: instead of “the company puts too much pressure on us,” ask “what am I absorbing and what am I passing through?”
None of these questions are easy. But they are the questions that move things forward. The other questions (the blame ones, the “why won’t they just” ones) don’t move anything.
In my work with tech leaders through the CQ Leadership Method, I see a consistent pattern: the leaders who grow fastest are not the ones with the most answers. They’re the ones who ask better questions. About their team, yes. But first about themselves.
The PCM Layer: Why Ownership Feels Different for Different Leaders
There’s something worth adding here that I don’t see discussed enough. Ownership doesn’t feel the same for everyone. How you process accountability depends heavily on your personality structure.
In the Process Communication Model (PCM), each personality type has a different relationship with responsibility under stress:
- Base Thinkers tend to over-own. They take on too much, fix things alone, and exhaust themselves trying to be right before admitting anything went wrong.
- Base Harmonizers tend to absorb blame emotionally. They feel personally responsible for how everyone else feels, which is a very different thing from productive ownership.
- Base Rebels can deflect under pressure, redirecting energy outward when things get uncomfortable. Not because they don’t care, but because distress pulls them away from accountability and toward reaction.
Understanding your type isn’t an excuse. It’s a map. When you know which way you tend to drift under pressure, you can catch yourself earlier and redirect.
That’s the difference between the complaint pattern and the ownership pattern. Not willpower. Awareness.
Test the Idea Before You Bet Everything on It
One more thing from Łukasz’s story that applies directly to tech leadership: he talked about a company that faked their AI transcription product before they’d built it. Real humans behind the scenes, doing the work manually, until they had enough proof to raise the money to build the real thing.
The lesson isn’t to be dishonest. It’s to validate before you commit. And this principle applies inside organizations just as much as in startups.
Before you propose a major structural change, run a small experiment. Before you overhaul your team’s process, test one element with one person. Before you go to your director with a new approach, get one data point that proves it works.
This isn’t timidity. It’s the exact opposite. It’s taking ownership of the outcome by reducing the risk of failure before it happens. Gartner research shows that 75% of managers feel overwhelmed by shifting responsibilities. A lot of that overwhelm comes from swinging big and missing, over and over. Smaller, faster loops fix that.
Three Shifts Worth Making This Week
1. Audit your language for one day.
Count how many times you say or think “they” in the context of a problem. Not to judge yourself. Just to see the pattern. Every “they” is a place where you could ask “I.”
2. Pick the problem you’ve been circling.
The one you’ve mentioned in meetings but haven’t solved. Ask: what is my actual contribution to this still being unsolved? What have I not done, not said, not initiated? That’s where you start.
3. Have the one conversation you’ve been avoiding.
Not all of them. One. The one you already know needs to happen. If you need a framework for it, the Leading Tough Conversations piece is a good starting point.
The Foundation of Every Good Decision
Leadership gets hard. Everyone knows that. But there’s a version of hard that’s draining, where things happen to you, and a version of hard that’s building, where you’re making choices and owning what comes next.
Lukasz’s friend David didn’t say “you chose this” to be cruel. He said it because it’s the most useful thing you can hear when you’re stuck. It gives you back the agency you’d temporarily handed to the circumstances.
You chose this role. You chose this team. You chose (directly or indirectly) the situation you’re now leading through.
What does owning it fully look like, starting today?
If this landed for you, go listen to Episode 160 of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast with Łukasz Łażewski. He talks about all of it without the LinkedIn polish. And if you want the weekly version of this kind of thinking, join the Leman Leadership Pulse: it lands in your inbox every Sunday.
Want to go deeper on communication, accountability, and leading people who don’t quit? Check out the 5 Biggest Leadership Feedback Mistakes, and Communication Debt article at lemanskills.com.
