The Leadership Balancing Act: Owning Everything While Empowering Others

It’s Wednesday morning, and you’ve just learned that a major infrastructure project is six months behind schedule and significantly over budget. Your council is demanding answers, residents are flooding social media with complaints, and your project team is pointing fingers in every direction. In this moment, you face a critical leadership balancing act – taking full ownership while simultaneously empowering your team to be part of the solution.

This week, we’re diving deep into Jocko Willink’s transformative leadership books: “Extreme Ownership” and “The Dichotomy of Leadership.” While these principles emerged from military experience, they offer powerful insights for municipal leaders wrestling with the complex challenges of city management. Together, these books provide a comprehensive framework for building a culture of ownership while maintaining the delicate balances crucial for effective leadership.

For MLDC members, our daily deep dives this week will explore four critical aspects of ownership-based leadership: establishing clear communication channels that empower decisive action, building trust through consistent ownership-focused behaviors, balancing hands-on leadership with staff autonomy, and creating systems that reinforce ownership at every level. (Not a member? Start your 7-day FREE trial today to access these insights and connect with other municipal leaders committed to excellence — Join Here.)

The Leadership Challenge
The reality is that organizational culture flows from the top. As a city manager, you can’t expect your department heads, managers, or front-line staff to embrace ownership if you’re not modeling it consistently yourself. When things go wrong – whether it’s a missed deadline, a budget overrun, or a communication breakdown – your response sets the tone for how your entire organization handles challenges.

Consider how different these scenarios look when filtered through an ownership lens:

Instead of: “The council didn’t provide clear direction on their priorities.”
Model: “I need to do a better job engaging with council to understand and clarify their vision.”

Instead of: “Department heads aren’t collaborating effectively.”
Model: “I haven’t created the right conditions and incentives for cross-departmental cooperation.”

Instead of: “We don’t have enough resources to solve this problem.”
Model: “I need to find creative ways to accomplish our mission within current constraints.”

The Power of Leadership Modeling
When you consistently demonstrate ownership as a leader, three fundamental shifts occur in your organization:

1. Trust Deepens
   When your team sees you taking responsibility for failures while distributing credit for successes, it creates psychological safety. This safety becomes the foundation for innovation, risk-taking, and genuine collaboration.
   
2. Solutions Emerge
   Your example shows that energy spent on blame or excuses is energy wasted. Teams naturally begin focusing on solutions when they see their leader consistently asking, “What can we do?” rather than “Why can’t we?”
   
3. Initiative Grows
   As fear of failure diminishes, staff at all levels begin taking ownership of challenges within their sphere of influence. They learn that making mistakes while taking initiative is preferable to passive inaction.
   

Implementing Ownership Culture
Start by examining your own leadership responses. When faced with challenges, ask:

• How am I contributing to this situation?
• What systems or processes could I improve?
• Where have I failed to provide clear guidance?
• How can I better support my team’s success?

The Next Step
Building a culture of ownership starts with you, but it doesn’t end there. It requires consistent modeling, reinforcement, and the wisdom to know when to take charge and when to step back. As you begin this week, identify one challenging situation where you could demonstrate stronger ownership – not by taking over, but by taking responsibility for creating better conditions for success.

Action Step: Share in the comments on the MLDC Platform: What’s one area where you could model stronger ownership for your team? How might this shift in approach influence your organization’s culture? Your insights could help another leader discover their next step forward.

Remember, transforming organizational culture begins with transforming your own leadership approach. When you genuinely own everything in your sphere of influence – including the outcomes that don’t go as planned – you create the foundation for a more accountable, innovative, and effective municipal organization.

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Seth Winterhalter is President of HaltingWinter Municipal Solutions, dedicated to making stronger cities through stronger leaders. Through executive coaching, results-based consulting, and the Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC), HaltingWinter helps city managers and municipal leaders transform their leadership impact and their organizational culture.