Taking ownership lets you transmute problems into opportunity.

Jocko Willink wrote a fantastic book called Extreme Ownership that challenges us, challenges leaders, to step up and start taking ownership for every aspect of their business, their practice, their cohort, and so on.

Today we have a lot of leaders who like to take credit when things are good, when things are going their way. They like to stand in front of the audience, receive the accolades, receive the standing ovations. We lack a culture where leaders take responsibility for all the results, all the negative results, where they take this, put it on their shoulders to bear, and protect the people who serve them, protect their clients, protect their staff members from all the negativity.

And this is truly a competitive advantage when you can internalize this concept of extreme ownership because it will allow you to start expanding your circle of influence, your circle of what you are able to control, and as a result you start being more effective when you start taking extreme ownership.

So a common one as leaders you’ll run into this quite often, and it is when staff members or team members make mistakes. I’ve certainly had this happen quite a bit, and it’s been brutal. It’s cost my clients. It’s cost me. And at the end of the day, it is easy to point at the staff member and say, “You’re at fault,” or tell my client, “This person’s at fault. This person’s the reason why we couldn’t keep our promise.”

It’s easy to do. It’s the easy and tempting option. The challenging option, which Willink and I challenge you to do, the challenging approach, is to say, “This was my mistake.” Maybe this truly was their mistake, like they messed up, but when we say, “This was my mistake,” we open the possibility for us to expand our sphere of influence.

If you’re familiar with Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you know the concept of spheres of influence. We expand this at every stage. Whenever they make a mistake, it’s an opportunity now for us to level up, to create structures and systems to prevent this mistake from ever happening again.

And if we don’t do this, if our easy inclination is to just point and blame, that means our organization never gets to level up and make sure this mistake never happens again. So taking ownership of mistakes, like literally passing the blame onto yourself. If I had the structure and the systems that would have prevented this mistake, this would have never happened. So yes, they can be to blame, but I’m choosing to blame myself.

Another one I want you to think about is results. So when I started my marketing career, maybe a little bit after I got my bearings, I made new patient acquisition my goal. I made that problem my goal. I wanted to solve the problem of new patient acquisition. So my sphere of what I saw as success or failure was that ultimate goal.

And people who aligned with me, people who wanted an agency, who wanted someone who could provide that solution, resonated because they wanted someone who could deliver certain results. Some agencies won’t go that deep. They will stay at the surface of “we will provide you leads.” Whatever happens after is out of our control, and it’s not something that it’s not a sphere of influence that we seek to envelop.

So they go one level higher. They say, “We will only provide you traffic,” or “We will only provide SEO,” or “We will only run the Google Ads account for you,” or “We will only do the website for you.” And the further away you get from the true result that you want, the less control that you have to deliver a bottom-line result that people are looking for.

So let’s say you’re doing treatments and you say, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to do all the follow-up, and then that’s it. We’re going to assume that you’re good to go.” That wouldn’t work, because the result people are looking for might not just be the treatment and a good after effect. They might be looking, if it’s cosmetic, for a certain result when they’re with friends or family. They might be looking for admiration. They might be looking for higher appeal in dating, or whatever it is. There is a result that people are going for when they get the service or product, or whatever it is that you do.

The old analogy is we don’t want a quarter-inch drill bit. We want the quarter-inch hole in the wall. But we have to extend that further. We don’t want the quarter-inch hole in the wall. We want the nail that holds the picture up. And we don’t want a picture that’s hanging up on the wall. We want the picture of me and maybe my spouse. And we want the feeling that it brings me. We want the feeling of connection that it brings my family. We want to feel loved.

So what is the ultimate result that people are going for, and start expanding what you do?

So an example, we started with websites. When I started my journey of helping practices get more new patients, we started with websites. And of course we hit a results wall. You can only do so much with a website. So we decided to expand, to add on another service. It was SEO at the time. Then we added another service because SEO wasn’t cutting it. We added ads. And then we realized, okay, we run ads and SEO, but looks like reviews are a big part of the equation. So we started offering review generation.

All this to continuously work on the final result. And we have to take ownership of this. We can’t just say, “Hey, I’m just going to get you this far and the rest is up to you.” You can, but it will only get you so far. You can blame people, but that will only take you so far.

If you want a resilient organization, if you want resilient results and sustainable long-term stuff, which if you watch my content you probably align with, then you’re going to want to expand this.

As an aside, this is why we started branching out into strategy, into education, because we realized we can only do so much when we provide traffic to people. When we provide leads, there is a gap between leads and actually patients coming up. And there’s a huge gap between patients coming up and patients referring. And what happens there is in the realm of the owner.

And so we decided, if we want to maximize the result of new patient acquisition, and really growth is what they’re going for, and really feelings of confidence, feelings of ease, those results that we’re going for, we have to incorporate more. We have to keep evolving what we decide to take ownership of.

So now our agency is not just about leads and traffic. It’s about education so that when the leads and traffic come, we’re able to get that result. I hope you’re following.

So we need to create this culture. You must become a leader who starts taking ownership. And an aspect of ownership, as you start looking at results and especially blame, is that we’re raised to provide certain things a certain way. And when we follow a beaten path, we get to a point where we can’t provide what we want to provide anymore. It’s just going to happen.

You’re going to want to deliver a result, and for one reason or another you’re going to hit a block, and there’s going to be an infinite number of paths you can take. If you are a leader who is not comfortable taking ownership, you’re not going to have the mental capacity to push through, to try and fail, to make mistakes, to take ownership of that and grow.

Ownership ultimately is a foundation that we need to embrace. A foundation for exploration, for growth, for making mistakes, for failing. If we do all that without taking ownership, you can fail all you want, you can make all the mistakes you can. It’s going to be blamed. You’re going to say, “That’s not something that I have to worry about.” And as a result, our organization never grows.

You never develop the systemic, the systematic approaches that create resiliency in your organizational system. You never internalize the other things that you could do to create better results.

So the message for you today is to start taking ownership of every single thing. No matter how far-fetched it might seem, start seeing how can I be the one that was responsible for this.

Now, this concept confused me for the longest time. Because let’s say you’re driving down the road, you’re parked at a red light, and someone rear-ends you. How can you take ownership of that? And I’m not saying that you should go out and say, “Sorry, that was my fault. Let me cover all the damages.” That’s not what I’m saying.

Take ownership of the result. Take ownership of the situation, of what happened. You are partially responsible because you chose to drive and stop in front of the red light in a certain way, and to some degree you were at the cause of things.

Now, this might be controversial because we also have a culture where you can’t blame the victim at all. It’s not acceptable to say that the victim had a sliver of responsibility in that situation. Some cases it’s true, but most cases it’s not.

And so what I’m challenging you to do is to find that sliver at every moment that you can, to level up, to choose to change whatever issue into an opportunity. And that is ownership. That is what’s available for you.

So hope this video was helpful. Go take ownership, make decisions, and see you in the next one.