Ownership at Work: How Leaders Turn Self-Awareness Into Action
Self awareness is noticing the wave, ownership is choosing your direction, and resilience is staying steady when the conditions change. I offered that image recently to the senior leaders of Antenna Group, gathered from all over the world, and it was the line most of them wrote down.
The three belong together, and they fail apart. Awareness without agency becomes commentary. Direction without steadiness lasts about a quarter. Steadiness without direction is simply endurance, which is what a great many capable people are currently mistaking for resilience.
What ownership at work actually means
Ownership at work is the deliberate choice to act on what is within your influence instead of protesting what sits outside it. It is about exercising agency, taking matters into your own hands and feeling genuinely connected to the outcome. In a sentence, it is the difference between asking "What is my role in shaping what happens next?" and asking "Why is this happening?"
It is not blame, and it is not taking on everything. A leader who owns a situation accepts responsibility for their own contribution to it, including their tone, their assumptions, their silence and their timing, and then acts on that contribution.
The distinction matters because organisations are full of accurate analysis that changes nothing. A team can diagnose a delayed project with real precision, name every external cause correctly, and still leave the room having moved nothing at all. Diagnosis is comfortable, because it points outward. Ownership is uncomfortable, because it points at the one variable that is genuinely yours.
Why self-awareness is the harder half
Self awareness is the capacity to notice how we show up: how our mindset and tone influence a room, how our assumptions shape decisions, and how our reactions land on the people who work for us. Without it, ownership has nothing to work with, because you cannot take responsibility for a pattern you cannot see.
This is where the research is genuinely humbling. Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2018, found that while roughly 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10% to 15% meet the criteria. Her work also found that people who reflect more are not automatically more self-aware, because the quality of the reflection matters far more than the quantity. Asking "why am I like this?" produces stories. Asking "what exactly did I do, and what effect did it have?" produces information you can act on.
For a leadership team the implication is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure. Most of us are working from a self-image our colleagues quietly disagree with, and that gap is invisible from the inside by definition. The only thing that narrows it is external data: feedback you actively ask for, and reactions you notice rather than explain away. How To Build Awareness During Stressful Moments goes further into catching that while it is happening, which is the harder discipline.
The circle of influence
The most useful map here remains Stephen Covey's distinction, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), between the circle of concern and the circle of influence. The circle of concern holds everything that worries you: the restructuring, the market, the decision taken two levels above you. The circle of influence holds the smaller set of things your own behaviour actually touches.
Covey's observation was that attention spent in the circle of concern shrinks the circle of influence, while attention spent inside the circle of influence expands it. Frustration is not neutral, in other words. It quietly reduces the agency you have available, which is why the most capable people in an organisation can also be the most stuck.
The research points the same way. In their meta-analysis of locus of control at work, Ng, Sorensen and Eby (Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2006) found that an internal locus of control, the belief that your own actions shape your outcomes, was consistently associated with better work experiences, stronger motivation and better wellbeing. None of that makes the external constraints imaginary. It means that where a leader places their attention has measurable consequences for what they are then able to do about them.
Culture is made in meetings, not in boardrooms
Within many organisations it is tempting to see decisions, and culture, as flowing mainly from the top. Culture is rather created in meetings, in feedback conversations, and in the moments when a manager decides whether to clarify, escalate, challenge constructively or remain silent. It is co-created by every leader who shapes the DNA of their own team.
Those moments are small and frequent, which is exactly why they teach so well. When a manager lets a vague brief pass without asking for clarity, six people learn that ambiguity is tolerated here. When a risk is raised and nobody escalates it, the room learns what happens to inconvenient information. When one senior person visibly takes responsibility for their part in a failure, the cost of honesty drops for everyone watching. When nobody does, the organisation learns that explanation is safer than accountability, and the most capable people begin keeping their assessments to themselves.
This is why ownership is a cultural lever rather than a personal virtue, and why What Conditions Are You Creating For Your Team To Thrive? is worth reading alongside this one.
A five-minute practice before a difficult conversation
This is the exercise I use most often in executive coaching. It is deliberately small, because the point is to shift your starting position, not to write a script.
Take three slow breaths, letting the out-breath be longer than the in-breath. You are not trying to relax, only to arrive.
Bring the situation to mind and notice where you feel it in the body. A tight jaw or shallow breathing is information about how you are about to walk into the room.
Name the story you are carrying in one sentence, beginning with "I am telling myself that". Hearing it usually reveals how much of it is interpretation.
Ask the ownership question directly: what is my role in shaping what happens next? Wait for a real answer rather than the first one.
Choose one behaviour you will change in the conversation, and make it something the other person could actually observe.
Leaders who run this report the same thing. The conversation itself did not get easier, but they arrived in it as a participant rather than as a defendant.
Where leadership begins
Resilience is the third term, and the one most often mistaken for toughness. It is what keeps ownership sustainable, because taking responsibility while depleted turns very quickly into taking on everything, which is the subject of Why Leadership Success Starts With Prioritizing Your Wellbeing.
If the price of greatness is responsibility, as Churchill put it at Harvard in 1943, then leadership begins the moment we choose to own what is under our influence, instead of fighting or getting frustrated about what we cannot control. None of the three is a personality trait. All three can be trained.
This is the conversation I am most often asked to open with a leadership team, usually as a keynote. Get in touch if it is one your organisation needs to have.