633 | Lead Better. Live Better: What Happens When You Take Ownership

Ownership isn't just about fixing mistakes. It's about leading on purpose.

Today we're breaking down what it looks like to take full responsibility for your leadership, your habits, and your results so you can lead better and live better. That is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are. Welcome to the show, folks.

I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are. Today, we are talking about ownership. What happens when you take ownership?

So if you've ever felt stuck in like a, you know, a cycle of reacting to problems, maybe chasing and putting out fires, or wondering when you're finally going to feel ahead instead of behind, which we've all been there, then this episode is for you.

Today we're talking about ownership, what it means, what it isn't, and how it radically transforms your leadership and your life.

Because the truth is, you can't change what you don't take responsibility for.

But when you do, that's when momentum, clarity, and impact really start to show up in your business and beyond. So we're gonna walk through a few key points here today.

Ownership Is the Opposite of Blame (00:01:38)

The first one of those being ownership is the opposite. Wait for it. Of blame, folks. Blame absolutely keeps you powerless. If you are going.

And listen, you don't have to be a business leader, business owner to operate in the stuff that we teach you can be any team member, you know, a spouse, anybody, it doesn't matter.

This is stuff you should be putting in play today. However, for business leaders and owners, you got to get this first for you, and then you need to be pushing this information into your team.

When you blame, when you play the victim card, when you have victim mentality, when it's always somebody else's fault, when you're not taking ownership, then you lose out on power, you lose out on options.

What you're saying is, is I am powerless to solve this. I am powerless to change this. And the big thing about victim mentality and way more people have victim mentality than they think it is.

Always one of the funny things is we are helping somebody, guiding them through something for them to realize, oh, my gosh, I have victim mentality.

It's something that everybody hate. Nobody sits there and goes, oh, I'm so glad to discover that I do have victim mentality.

Everybody hates it. But here's the key. When you have victim mentality, it is impossible for you to take responsibility.

Because what you are saying is all of this, whatever this is, this situation, the way that people are responding, what my parents are doing, whatever it is, the response of victim mentality is saying, I can't do anything about this because this is happening to me.

So every time you find yourself in a situation where you are responding as though something is happening to you and you are powerless to change it, fix it, solve it, get away from it, whatever, that's victim mentality.

So think about it as like, I don't know, a team leader is, is blamed for bad hires, for poor performance. When that team leader owns that, you know, he or she never set clear expectations for what the hires should be.

Let's say that that's the issue. Then all of a sudden, instead of it being this person has done a bad job, this person's the one to blame when that person takes ownership.

Now we can change what the expectation and the outlook is. So if we have bad hires, then we have a different problem instead of it being just somebody's fault.

And it could be that somebody didn't communicate well. But if our focus is on blaming the leader, then what are we not focused on? Solving the problem. And if we just focus on blame, then we don't focus on gaining quality perspective.

And quality perspective helps us get to understanding what the actual problem is. Once we have that perspective, once we have that information, we can do something about it.

What if it's just that this team lead has never set clear communications or clear expectations, I should say, or in communication on what the hire should look like.

What their personality style should be, does it fit the role, what their values are, what we're expecting, you know, what's their KRAs show?

What are the expectations of them doing their job really well? What does all of that look like if we stop focusing on blame?

Oh, well, Chris, somebody has to take responsibility. Yeah, I'm with you. Somebody does have to take responsibility. But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about blame.

Blame is, it's your fault, you solve it where what we need to be doing is going.

You know, for us, we have our five step process. What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? How do we fix it? How do we make sure it never happens again? Which takes us well beyond who did it.

That's not the focus. We may be trying to find out where it came from. You know, how did this happen? Why did this happen? That's pieces of perspective, but we don't stop there.

We move on. How do we solve this? So instead of looking out the window of blame, how about start looking in the mirror of responsibility.

Oh, there's a tweetable. I guess they don't call it a tweetable. Do you call it an exable? I don't know.

Ownership Means You Respond, Not React (00:06:40)

Key point number two. Ownership means you respond, not react.

Taking ownership gives you the space so that you can respond with intentionality. Taking ownership gives you the space so you can respond with intentionality instead of reacting emotionally.

Folks, this is huge. You have to stop yourself and ask the question, you know, what's my role in this? This tension? What's my role in this situation?

If you will do that, you will be amazed at how quickly you can diffuse a conflict. You can diffuse an issue. Here's what I can guarantee you.

You are going to be able to solve a problem, a conflict, attention, whatever it is, a thousand times faster than if you just react emotionally.

Because reacting emotionally is all about who. It's all about you. Right? When we respond emotionally and we are not being emotionally intelligent about how we are acting in the moment, then we have to solve our emotional problem.

And what we're saying to other people is, you have to be a part of solving my emotional problem. This is my emotional issue right now. I am a victim. I can't do anything about this.

So I'm just going to respond super emotionally. Well, what if it isn't that I'm being a victim? I'm just really upset about the situation.

Well, have you ever found that being really upset about the situation caused somebody to fix it really quickly? Has that ever worked? No, it doesn't.

Well, sometimes you just got to get on to people and oh my gosh, there's all kinds of ways that people want to be able to have the excuse of being emotionally upset or emotionally reacting and then placing it on other people.

Here's the deal. If you will stop breathe. Question. What is my role here?

Then instead of just reacting and causing people to never take risks again and causing people to, you know, hold back on their productivity because they don't want to be failures again.

Because they've now seeing how you respond, if you will take a breath, if you will pause, if you will ask, what's my role in this situation?

Then what you'll find is your response can change everything. Everything. It's up to you. You can choose. But ownership means that you respond, not emotionally react.

Ownership Doesn’t Equal Perfection (00:09:35)

Number three, ownership does not, nor will it ever equal perfection. Listen to me. You do not have to have all the answers. You just got to be willing to take the next step, the next right step.

When we are so focused on what is the perfect answer to this situation?

What is the perfect answer to this conflict? Then what happens is, is we pile onto us. More stress, more struggle. Why? Because the energy it takes to get to perfection is just too high.

You can't get there. You're. You're not going to get there. What's the next right step? Right. What's the next thing that you can do to solve, to fix, to do, whatever? Not perfection.

How about we move in the right direction and start doing something well, but what if it's not the perfect right answer?

You're probably going to find out pretty quickly, make an adjustment and keep going. We had a business owner who admitted to us, you know, they were incredibly overwhelmed.

They asked for help and they're like, listen, I'm just overwhelmed. And the more that we helped this business owner to solve the overwhelm, to solve the, hey, listen, it, you know.

And one of the big pieces of being overwhelmed was this concept of perfection that just doesn't exist.

Right as we help that it didn't just fix the. The business owner, it literally unlocked his team's potential. Literally. Why? Because people were seeing a different response from the business owner.

And when the team, who takes their cues from you, leader, whether you're leader, business owner, parent, your kids, take their cues from you.

When they see that you don't lose your ever loving mind over a situation, but that you handle it well, you handle it with emotional intelligence, you handle it calmly to the best of your ability, then it tells them that they can do the same.

I'll never forget we were. This is before my wife and I got married. This is before we were dating. We were working together and we were getting prepared for an event and she was at one end of this event space and I was at the other.

And I know it probably not a picture you want in your head, but I'm the kind of person..

When I'm preparing for something, I've got music cranked and you know, I'm over there dancing and just singing to, I don't know, probably Doobie Brothers or something like that, just having fun Chicago.

And she came, a problem came up and she called me over and she explained what the problem was. I asked a few questions. What are we doing about that? Well, we're doing this.

And what's our time frame? Well, we should know by this time this afternoon and asked questions and I said okay. And I was like, is there anything else? Nope.

Okay. I went back to the other end of the event space and started going through my notes and just, you know, enjoying music and dancing around.

And she goes, how can you possibly be dancing around right now with this situation? She yells this across the event space. And I go, would it help if I was upset? And she goes, no.

I said, would it help if I was, you know, depressed or angry? No. Okay, well, since that's not going to help, I'm going to keep having fun over here.

Since we have a plan, we know what time frame, if we get to that time frame and things don't work out, then maybe my attitude will change.

But as of right now, there's nothing I can do to fix this. We have a fix in place. We have expectations. Keep moving forward. So I went back again.

You know, just be bopping around with my music, probably not bebopping around, but, you know, I've got much cooler moves than that. No, I don't. I really don't. Just back there dancing.

And then like a few minutes later, she calls out to me again and she goes, you know, my entire life I believed that, that I had to show people I was stressed out for them to know that I was taking things seriously.

And I was like, I get that. I understand that. That's teaching. That's training, right? That's Root System issues right there. I said, here's what I need you to understand.

I already know by the way that you handled the problem that you're taking it seriously.

I already know by the questions that I asked you that you've already done your due diligence to the best of your ability at this current moment, which means you're taking it seriously.

So keep on rocking on. Don't be stressed out. Don't be freaked out. When you freak, you freeze. Don't be stressed out.

Enjoy your day. And when it gets to the time frame that we're talking about, then if it didn't work out, we handle it differently. And it just blew her mind.

It was just. It was something that she couldn't comprehend until I explained that being upset, being stressed out is not going to change your situation.

It doesn't. And that allowed her to free herself up from feeling like, because she was working for me at the time, from feeling like this business owner had to see her stressed out.

She did her job. She did exactly what she knew to do. I knew she did what she needed to do, done. And that freed her up in that moment.

Folks, the thing is, ownership isn't about you controlling everything, right?

It's about you being responsible for what is yours. Take responsibility for what you can when we got to the afternoon crazy thing, the stuff that she made sure was in place solved the problem. It fixed it.

What if we would have stressed out and I think it was probably four or five hours off before, you know the next phase of solving this problem. What if we would have stressed out for four or five stinking hours?

What a colossal waste of life. Not necessary.

Ownership Sets the Cultural Standard (00:16:27)

Point number four, ownership sets the cultural standard.

So when leaders model ownership, the team follows. When leaders model, the team follows. Most of the people on your team are looking to you to how they should respond, how they should take responsibility.

You may have some folks that are slackers and they're victims and they're always going to be blaming somebody else.

It's always somebody else's fault, somebody else's responsibility. But for the most part, you probably have a decent number of people who are looking to you to see what do I do with this situation now?

I've shared this 14 billion times that we have our five step process. What happened? How did happen? Why did it happen? How do we fix it? How do we make sure it never happens again?

It is interesting to me whenever we've had a new team member come on board that you know, a problem happens and you know, a lot of times people don't want to disappoint you, so they may kind of hide what happened and try and solve it on their own.

Well, those are almost always going to come to leadership. Right. There's almost always going to be some level of light shed on that.

I have had people in the past, it's been a very long time, but I've had people in my early years of, of leading that when something like that happened and I can see that they weren't just bringing it forward.

It's not like they were lying or anything. They just weren't coming forward with, hey, this happened. I don't know what to do, what do I do? That's when I will say, why aren't you sharing this information?

And they'll be like, every time they're like, well, I didn't want to disappoint you. Okay, well, I'm disappointed you didn't share the information.

What do you know that we are going to do when you do share this situation? Well, I mean, we'll do the, we'll do the steps and they'll walk through the steps. Okay, and then what happens after that? We go back to work. Okay.

So you don't get your head ripped off? No. Has anybody ever gotten their head ripped off? No. Then what are you afraid of.

And it helps them to see that they have been carrying this belief system that's probably coming from pretty crappy previous cultures.

But they have this belief system that the owner or a team lead is going to respond a certain way that usually equates to their heads getting lopped off. Right.

When you model how you take responsibility, when you model how you take ownership, it literally helps your team members to go, oh, my gosh, I'm not going to get my head lopped off.

Which means that I can take risks, I can do this, I can solve, I can come clean when I've made a mistake. And we tell our team members, we expect you to fail.

Just don't know fatal failures and don't keep repeating the same failure. Fix it. But understand, if you're not failing at all, you're not doing anything, and we're paying you and you're not doing anything. So we want our money back.

We don't say that part. But we will let our team members know. We want you to be moving things around and understand that because you are, you're gonna.

There's probably a chance that you're gonna create an issue, there's something that's gonna fail.

So when you take ownership and you model that, it helps them to understand, right? It helps your team to change the way that they look to blame.

When you have a bad culture, and we talked about the blame piece, when you have a bad culture where leadership responds horribly, it tends to create this blame culture. Right?

You'll see people that are like, hey, I can't get thrown under the bus. I'm going to throw Frank under the bus over there.

I'm going to blame this on somebody else so that, you know, I don't tick off the-- the owner, the. The team leader, who-- whoever it is.

The key is the more you show this, the more they will start responding the way that you do. Your team will never rise higher than what you model. Well, let me. That's an accurate statement: The team.

You might have individuals, but as a whole, what you'll discover is the team does not rise higher than you do.

Ownership Creates Margin and Momentum (00:20:56)

Number five, ownership creates margin and momentum.

Owning your time, your energy, your habits gives you the fuel to move forward on purpose. So, you know, we've been teaching leaders for the longest time to close out their day.

If you've been through Killing the Leadership Crazy Cycle, you understand this.

It is vitally important for you to create, you know, a space of time at the end of your day, even if you're not done.

We'll tell people like let's say, you know, at 4:45 you're gonna sit down and brain dump all of the things that need to get done for tomorrow and prioritize them by time blocks. Right?

Batch things. Prioritize what's the most important stuff. When are you gonna get those things done? All that kind of fun stuff. Make a to-do list. I know people are always like to do lists are silly.

No they're not. Those of us highly successful people that use to-do lists, use them to get more highly successful. We actually control our sets of time. We make sure that we have margin, we make sure that it helps us to accomplish things.

It's vitally important. I have so many things on my list of things to do that is the show, that is events. I mean I walk this through sometimes with folks that come through StratPlan and stuff.

We do only 10 to 12 StratPlans a year only because they're week long events. It's four and a half days. It's five days of my time essentially spent in a room helping a leadership team find all the things that are holding them back in their business.

Imagine how much time that is. 50 to 60 business days a year. We do so many Next-Level Lives a year. We do a handful of events, the retreats that we do with our, our Mastermind clients.

The Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event that we do. I spend a lot of time creating these shows. When you take all of that time together, that is a lot of time that is not spent leading a team.

So I have to be very intentional about the time that I lead my team. Now I'm going to be honest with you. Nowadays I have spent so much time leading the phenomenal leadership that we have.

And Joel is our president and Lyneé is our VP. Aaron West, Catherine, all the folks that are doing a phenomenal job leading people, we have spent so much time pouring into them, making sure that our leadership team understands how to do this.

I mean we, we've got some of the top coaches as far as I'm concerned in leading other business leaders and owners to success. They've spent so much time understanding this that I don't have to spend a ton of time leading them now.

They're doing a phenomenal job. I lead on really big things and I don't lead the team. I just lead the leaders. I lead the leaders, they lead the teams.

So the amount of time I have to have to spend time with them is still vitally important. And then I still have everything else that I do for this business. Right.

And, or the other businesses as well. Right. That is important for me to control those sets of time. If I don't, then all of a sudden I, I can become very overwhelmed. I can fall behind on things that I need to accomplish.

So if you think about it, if you just spend time, like I say, closing out your day, take time. At the end of the day, do this brain dump or if you've been doing this for a while, what you do is you're creating every day's to do list.

When you get to the end of the day, reprioritize what's left. Add what needs to go. You know, if there's room for more, add those pieces, reprioritize all of that for tomorrow.

Get that done. If you start your day by owning the way your day is going to go, by setting sets of time, by putting high priority things first, by doing all of that, then your day starts with phenomenal choices.

You know exactly what you're supposed to go after and you just go after it and you start knocking things off your list. So when you have ownership, it creates margin for you, your time, your sanity, and it creates momentum.

Action Items (00:25:29)

So here's three things that I want you to do starting today. First off, I want you to write down three areas where you're currently reacting instead of responding.

Three areas where you're currently reacting instead of responding. Try to make this at work, but you might find that there are things at home that are even you're reacting to even bigger.

Second thing, choose one one thing to take full ownership of this week.

No matter what it is. Identify what needs to change and who needs to know and take ownership. Third thing, lead a team conversation around what healthy ownership looks like in your culture.

Well, but Chris, if I haven't been modeling it, that's okay. There is nothing wrong with explaining to your team, this is the direction I'm going in. This is the direction we are going in. I'm going to tell you what healthy looks like.

And here we go. You're going to see me busting it to try and make this happen. So model it, explain it, but help them to start taking ownership in a very healthy way.

Additional Resources (00:26:43)

So here's some resources that we've got for you. Episode 310 how to change your life by leading yourself better. This is where we discuss how to lead yourself better. And what does that mean and why does it matter?

Virtual Team Training (00:26:56)

Now imagine transforming your leadership style without ever leaving your office. Our virtual team training delivers tools, accountability and insights that you can apply immediately on your schedule.

So check out the team training link that is in the notes. Click on it. Just get some information to see how much this can change the way you lead the way your team leads.

Conclusion (00:27:26)

Folks, ownership isn't about guilt. It is absolutely about growth and when you lead yourself with intention, everything around you gets stronger.

Next week we're unpacking one of the biggest leadership traps, doing it all alone and the hidden cost it's having on your life and your leadership. Well folks, that's all the time that we have for today.

Hopefully this has been a blessing. Hopefully this has helped you. Please help us to help others by sharing this. Please help us to help others by commenting on our shows. We do this so that we can help as much as we possibly can.

As always, we want you to take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life and join us on the next episode.