“My” is a strange word to watch closely. People use it to claim the good part. My project. My portfolio. My win. And then you reach the part where “my” would actually cost something — the early, ambiguous, easy-to-get-wrong work — and suddenly the ownership gets narrower.

I watched this happen recently. Someone who genuinely owned a piece of work couldn’t bring themselves to produce the one document that would let the work begin. That’s not mine to write, roughly. And the odd thing is, they weren’t wrong to feel that way. I’ll come back to that.

My first instinct was to judge it. My second instinct, which took longer, was to wonder if they were right.

Because here’s what I’ve stopped being able to unsee: it’s very easy to find people who want to own the result, and very hard to find anyone who wants to own the part before the result. The scoping. The spec. The definition. The boring document nobody claps for, the one that quietly decides whether the whole thing even makes sense. Everyone wants the outcome to be theirs. Almost nobody wants the input to be theirs.

And it shows up in more than one shape.

The first shape is the one I just described. You own the thing, but not the unglamorous work that makes the thing possible. You’ll take responsibility for the launch, but the brief the launch depends on should come from someone else. You own the number, but not the messy definitional work underneath it. The ownership is real right up until the point where it costs something, and then it narrows.

The second shape is quieter and, honestly, harder to argue with. It sounds like discipline. It’s the person who declines a piece of work by filing it under a different category. “This is a commercial decision, so commercial should drive it — it’s not a technical problem.” “This is a business call, not mine to make.” The category does the refusing for you. And the tricky part is that this is sometimes exactly right. Role clarity is real. Boundaries are how organizations keep everyone from stepping on everyone. The problem is that role clarity and responsibility-dodging sound identical out loud. What separates them is the bridge — not mine, but here’s who should own it, and here’s what I’ll contribute. Without that, the boundary is just a wall.

And here’s where I have to be fair, because I don’t actually know which one I was watching. I don’t know if the person refusing was protecting a good boundary or dodging the risky early work. That uncertainty isn’t a weakness in the story. It’s the whole point. In a certain kind of organization, the two become impossible to tell apart, because the system has quietly made dodging the smart play — and dressed it up as professionalism.

So let me make the uncomfortable case. What if the deflection is rational?

Think about how blame usually gets stored. It sits with the person holding the artifact when it fails, not the person who pointed the whole thing in the wrong direction early on. The definitional work — the brief, the spec, the scope — is dangerous precisely because it’s upstream. Get it wrong and everything downstream fails and traces back to you. So people learn, without ever saying it out loud, to touch things late. After the risky part is done by someone else. If your organization punishes the person who owned the early document and celebrates the person who showed up at the launch, then refusing to write the document is just someone reading the incentives correctly.

That’s the version I can’t shake. I’ve come to read the deflection differently. It’s a price signal — someone telling you what accountability costs here.

So who actually picks it up? Usually one person. The one who can’t watch a gap stay open. And here’s the part that should bother you, because it’s what makes the whole system self-perpetuating: that person doesn’t get rewarded for it. They become the go-to, then the default, then the dumping ground. More accountability flows toward the one person absorbing it, because the organization can feel where the sponge is. And reliability, once it’s established, turns invisible — you don’t applaud the thing you’ve come to expect.So they carry more, get noticed less, and eventually burn out or leave, while someone who managed their visibility better gets the role.

Which is why I want to be careful here, because this is usually where essays like this end up, and it’s wrong. The lesson is not “say yes to everything.” Saying yes to everything isn’t heroism, it’s volunteering to be the subsidy. It’s my own weakness, if I’m honest, and I’ve watched it cost people I respect.

So the answer sits in between. Take one more inch of responsibility than your title strictly requires — chosen deliberately, not absorbed by default, and made visible rather than swallowed in silence. Growth lives in that inch. It’s where reputations actually get built, in the pre-glory phase when nobody’s watching and nobody else volunteers. Senior roles are almost entirely ambiguity, and the person who quietly owns ambiguity becomes the person you trust with more of it. But burnout lives in the mile — the mile you took because nobody else would, and because nobody made them.

The individual version of this is a discipline. The organizational version is a design problem, and this is the part I keep coming back to, because I’m not just someone watching this happen. I’m someone who sets the price of accountability for the people below me.

If accountability is the cheapest thing in the room, that isn’t a failure of character in my people. It’s a failure of design, and it’s mine to fix. Practically, that means a few things. It means never handing someone accountability for an outcome they don’t have the authority, budget, or skills to actually deliver, because handing someone accountability without the tools to deliver is just handing them the blame. It means making the early, unglamorous work visible and credited, instead of only celebrating the launch and teaching everyone to arrive late. It means that when a gap surfaces in a room, I close it on the spot by assigning it, not by shaming whoever named it — what I’m closing is the orphaned work, not the person who pointed at it. It means watching who’s absorbing everything and redistributing before they break. And it means modelling the boundary myself: owning things visibly, and also saying out loud what I’m not owning and who should, so the people watching me learn that accountability is something you choose and bound, not something that erases you.

The phrase I started with cuts both ways. Accountability is the cheapest thing in the room because everyone walks past it — and it’s the most valuable thing you can pick up, precisely because everyone else is walking past it. But it only stays valuable if the room is built so that picking it up doesn’t quietly destroy you.

Making it worth its real price isn’t the individual’s job. That one’s mine.