Applying Radical Ownership to Building a More Meaningful Career

Taking Complete Ownership of Your Career Journey

“There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.” So declares Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL commander, leading podcast host, and co-author of the book Extreme Ownership.

His central philosophy - radical ownership - entails taking extreme levels of responsibility for all outcomes in your sphere of influence. As Jocko writes, “A leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.”

This doesn’t mean burning yourself out trying to control every detail. Rather, it means owning your perspectives, decisions and plans fully. It means being deeply accountable for mistakes without making excuses. It requires focusing energy on the things you can influence rather than complaining about forces you can’t.

As Jocko sums it up: “If there is a problem in my organization, it is my problem. If you have a problem in your organization, it is your problem. That is what ownership is all about.”

For many professionals today, the chance to apply radical ownership feels out of reach. We operate in matrixed organizations where work gets done across fluid teams with blurred lines of responsibility. It’s easy to point fingers when failures happen or disengage when we lack decision rights on projects.

But embracing radical ownership is a superpower we can cultivate regardless of formal roles. It’s available to individual contributors and managers alike. The mindset lifts our agency to shape better career experiences and outcomes. It connects us to the why of work by deepening accountability to teams.

Through ownership, we evolve from passive participants to active shapers of our professional journeys. With embodied ownership, we transform not just work results but our meaning, engagement and growth.

The First Steps on the Ownership Journey

We must choose to take responsibility for career trajectories many feel trapped in. We reject victim mentalities about forces holding us back. We step past complaints about the weaknesses of bosses, priorities of execs or resource constraints.

Instead, we ask ourselves questions like:

• What can I do right now to improve my skills or increase my value?
• How can I lift struggling colleagues despite roadblocks?
• What insights am I missing for why things operate as they do?
• What small risks might I take to test new ideas?
• How can I turn setback moments into learnings?

This self-interrogation reorients focus toward self-influence rather than forcing external change. As management thinker Peter Drucker advised: “Don’t waste time trying to change the past. Invest in the future.”

Still the ownership journey starts with understanding all dimensions of the current reality before driving change.

The first practices Jocko prescribed for SEAL leaders taking over troubled platoons were to 1) check ego 2) take inventory of standards and 3) plan for improvement. Let’s explore what this looks likes for career ownership.

Check Your Ego

Resist the temptation to blame issues on people or factors outside your control. Get radically honest with self-critique before assessing external realities. Ask yourself:

• Is my attitude empowering the highest potential or unintentionally dragging things down?
• Do my behaviors display full commitment despite frustrations?
• What assumptions of mine might be clouding my judgment about challenges?
• How could I model more of the change I want to see?

Inventory Standards

Before declaring what’s wrong, deeply understand current career conditions. Avoid pre-judging reality through the lens of expectations. Take an impartial accounting of:

• Written goals set with manager – are they clear or misaligned?
• Skills needed for next career leap – where are my gaps?
• Workplace cultural values – do they empower or inhibit excellence?
• Access to resources, learning – am I fully utilizing offerings?
• My decision rights and influence – how far can I shape things?

Improve Conditions

With an accurate map of the present state, identify the most critical actions that drive progress. In this framework, we need to:

• Communicate standards clearly
• Train skills needed for those standards
• Enforce adherence through rewards and punishment
• Drive above standard performance through peer motivation

For careers, this means setting public goals with managers, pursuing learning vigorously, celebrating small wins and activating intrinsic drive.

Getting Promoted

Imagine you have a goal to earn a promotion. Traditional mindsets wait for managers to open up advancement opportunities then hope our work gets noticed. We secretly harbor complaints when passed over rather than transparently addressing gaps.

A radical ownership approach flips the script through fully taking charge of upleveling ourselves proactively. This self-empowerment sets our course ahead while inviting managers to actively coach our journey.

Owning a promotion cycle means:

Building The Realistic View of Your Career Today

• Building genuinely supportive alliances to advocate for me
• Identifying precursor assignments I can tackle demonstrating higher performance
• Openly discussing promotion motivations with my manager

Addressing Your Weak Spots

• Self-assessing against promotion criteria to surface my gaps
• Tackling new rotations expanding my exposure areas
• Pursuing trainings aligned with next level skills

Quantifying Impact

• Setting measurable short-term objectives showing my readiness
• Rigorously tracking data evidencing business impact
• Benchmarking myself against historical examples of high performance

Activating Agency in Your Journey

• Volunteering for strategic special projects
• Presenting recommendations to execs boosting visibility
• Seeking direct feedback from senior leaders

Proactively Closing Knowledge Gaps

Surfacing what I still need to know encourages support:

• Asking about unfamiliar future technologies on the horizon and how I build fluency
• Getting demos of new products/programs that require deeper literacy
• Identifying adjacent roles to shadow for a day expanding my empathy

Radical ownership of career advancement is ultimately an inquiry-based mindset. We let go of waiting for things to happen to us. We start courageously questioning:

What more can I be doing to develop? How can I expand influence despite constraints? Who else can provide mentoring? Where are possibilities I’m not seeing? Your self-directed pursuit recruits others to advocate your journey.

3 Steps for Overcoming Roadblocks

Inevitably, external obstacles will still arise that slow career momentum. Promotions stalls. Struggling projects get assigned. Managers don’t see our full potential. Companies restructure.

Traditionally, we complain about these impediments privately to peers. We wait for roadblocks to resolve rather than confronting them. Over time, disempowerment creeps into the narrative we tell ourselves.

Radical ownership offers an alternative response. View obstacles as information - not ammunition. Openly inspect their root causes with curiosity not frustration. Difficult conditions provide invaluable data for self-improvement.

As billionaire entrepreneur Ray Dalio advocates in his book Principles, all setbacks contain “gifts” if we reflect openly rather than reacting defensively. This inquisitive lens builds understanding and agency over time. It transforms barriers into fuel for future success through lessons encoded.

When facing down roadblocks:

Get Curious

• What is this obstacle trying to tell me?
• Might assumptions of mine be creating this friction?
• How could this actually prepare me for something better ahead?

Run Small Tests

• What bold requests for support resources might I make?
• Who can provide unique vantage on the true issues at play?
• What incremental progress steps are fully under my control?

Get Back to Basics

• Is there additional training to pursue filling my gaps?
• How can I showcase more initiative despite constraints?
• Who around me is already modeling solutions I can learn from?

Maintaining ownership means embracing hardship as an opportunity. Transform obstacles into an invitation for self-reflection and small experiments changing conditions. You reclaim agency in the process.

Owning Team Impact

Beyond individual contributor career journeys, radical ownership also empowers our ability to uplift teams. As managers, how we shape culture through modeling values matters immensely. But even as ICs, we have immense influence to positively impact groups we participate in.

Owning team success means first checking oneself with humility:

• What energy am I bringing daily through body language and comments? Does it lift others up?
• How could I do more to volunteer for unglamorous work that aids colleagues?
• What lessons can I distill from past team tensions to defuse conflict?

Get Clear on Shared Mission

Aligning around purpose inspires ownership. As a leader or IC, use moments like kickoffs to:

• Connect group goals to meaningful outcomes for customers and company
• Get vulnerable sharing why it matters personally for you
• Distill principles for behaviors - then lead by living them

Role Model Ownership

Demonstrate the high bar starting with yourself:

• Publicly own mess ups quickly focusing solutions not shame
• Verbally celebrate colleagues displaying initiative
• Challenge peers to uphold principles when standards slip

Coach Ownership Thinking

Draw out pathways for self-influence with colleagues:

• When roadblocks arise, probe for root causes over snap reactions
• Brainstorm small experiments testing solutions when stuck
• Ask what they could do more of to drive positive change

Radically owning team impact multiplies engagement, problem solving and even belonging. It’s profoundly contagious, inspiring others toward self-leadership.

The Fulfillment Formula

Ultimately the most rewarding aspect of pursuing radical ownership is the personal fulfillment it unlocks. Regaining authority over our careers connects work deeply with identity and meaning. It strengthens self-worth in the process.

By shedding victim mindsets, we stop feeding narratives about being subject to organizational forces. We unlock agency to guide our journeys. We take responsibility for being the protagonists in our unfolding story.

And by fully owning team commitments, we become heroes advancing collective success stories. This builds bonds of belonging and significance multiplying wellbeing.

In the words of organizational development expert Frederick Laloux, “Taking ownership appeals to a deeper human need - to be given responsibility, to make a difference, to be trusted to handle things.”

This tripod of professional agency, belonging and trust cultivates careers where joy is sustained. It fosters the kind of generative culture that unlocks human potential. As Jocko says “Leaders must demonstrate extreme ownership so their teams can thrive.”

Are you ready to reclaim radical ownership over your career - wherever it stands today? The first step is choosing courage over comfort through asking tough questions about your current influence.

Growth starts when we own exactly where we stand now, Rather than wishing things were different. From there, small steps build momentum organically through new experiments.

When we fully take the wheel steering our journey, with deep care for those alongside us, we unlock meaning, mastery and legacy. This is the fullest manifestation of radical career ownership. Our lives change in the process - and so do all those lucky enough to walk the path with us.

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