Every business has an org chart, and most org charts say the same thing: this person owns this department. What they rarely show is whether that ownership is real, or whether it's a title sitting on top of a department that three other people are quietly running by consensus, because nobody was ever actually given the authority to make the call alone.
The gap between title and authority
Ownership isn't the same as being the most senior person in the room. Real ownership means someone can make a decision, be accountable for the outcome, and change course without needing four other people to agree first. In a lot of growing businesses, that authority never got handed over properly. It got implied, and implied authority evaporates the moment there's real pressure or disagreement.
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin put it bluntly in Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win:
"The Leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything."
That's uncomfortable in a tech or operations context for the same reason it's true: a department head who only owns the parts that go well hasn't actually been handed the department. They've been handed a title and a credit line, with the risk quietly held somewhere else.
How to spot fake ownership
The clearest sign is what happens when something in that department goes wrong. If the answer to "who's accountable for this" involves more than one name, or a shrug, ownership was never really established, it was assumed. Another sign: if every decision in that department, even small ones, ends up escalated to the founder or MD anyway, the department head has a title, not ownership.
Why this happens in growing businesses specifically
Early on, everyone does a bit of everything, and that works because the business is small enough for one person to hold the whole picture in their head. As the business grows, roles get created and titles get handed out, but the underlying habit of everyone weighing in on everything often doesn't go away. The org chart changes. The behaviour underneath it frequently doesn't.
No bad teams, only bad leaders
Willink and Babin tell a story from Navy SEAL training that applies directly here. A struggling boat crew, consistently last in every race, was given a new leader pulled from the best-performing crew. Within days, the struggling crew was winning. The leader hadn't changed the people. He'd refused to accept their excuses, set one clear standard, and taken ownership of results the crew had previously blamed on bad luck or each other.
What happened next is the more interesting part. The crew he'd left behind, now under a far less experienced leader, kept winning anyway. The standard he'd instilled had become the team's own habit, not something that depended on him being in the boat.
"Extreme Ownership—good leadership—is contagious."
— Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership
The same test applies to a department that's underperforming. Before concluding the team is the problem, it's worth asking honestly whether the person meant to own that team's results has actually been holding them, and themselves, to a standard — or quietly accepting excuses because confronting them is uncomfortable.
Check the ego
Real ownership is hardest to practise exactly when someone else has visibly made the mistake. The instinct is to point at the person who got it wrong. Willink and Babin argue the leader should do the opposite: own the failure publicly, even when someone else's hands were on it, because the leader was responsible for the training, the clarity, or the process that let the mistake happen.
"Ownership of everything! This isn't his fault, it's yours. You are in charge, so the fact that he didn't follow procedure is your fault."
— Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership
This isn't about taking blame for its own sake. It's tactical. Two people defending their egos can't see a shared problem clearly. One person removing their own ego from the conversation can get straight to fixing it — and in doing so, finds out whether the real gap was a process that was never made clear, rather than a person who simply failed.
What real ownership requires
Three things, and most departments are missing at least one. Clear scope: this person owns this, specifically, not "roughly this area." Actual authority to decide within that scope without needing sign-off for routine calls. And a genuine tolerance for them getting some of those calls wrong, because ownership without room to make mistakes isn't ownership, it's just being the person who gets blamed.
A department head who can't admit a mistake without it becoming a problem for their career isn't going to surface problems early. They'll manage the appearance of control instead, which is worse than no ownership at all, because it looks fine right up until it isn't.
Cover and move
Real ownership also includes owning the handoffs, not just the metrics inside your own box. Willink and Babin call this Cover and Move — teams depending on each other and knowing who depends on them, rather than optimising for their own patch in isolation.
"If the overall team fails, everyone fails, even if a specific member or an element within the team did their job successfully."
— Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership
This is where clear departmental ownership can go wrong if it's taken too literally: a head who owns their patch so tightly that they stop depending on, or supporting, the departments either side of them. Knowing who relies on your department's output, and who you rely on for yours, is part of the job — not an extra.
The test worth running
Pick one department and ask its head to make three decisions this week without checking with anyone first, decisions genuinely within their remit. If that feels uncomfortable, either for them or for you, that discomfort is the actual answer to whether ownership exists there. Most businesses find at least one department where the answer is genuinely no.