Responsibility grows outwards in concentric circles. The innermost circle is your own work: your tasks for today, this week, this month. Beyond it are your team, your company, and the world your work touches. Your job description only covers the smallest circle. How far out you choose to take responsibility, through ownership and imagination rather than hours, decides your impact over a career.
This is the second piece in a series on what I call the capacity for greatness. Part 1 was about the ceiling, and why it is higher than you think. This one is about the people doing the work, not leading it. In my experience, that is where most careers are quietly made or capped.
A soldier in the trenches
Early in my career I was a young engineer in large software consultancies, entrusted with technical leadership of bigger and bigger, more complex and more expensive projects. Most of those projects were impeccable technically. Some were hailed as a big success. Others, seemingly just as good, failed to deliver the business impact that would justify the time, effort and expense of the teams behind them.
I could not understand why. From close to the bottom of the command chain, we were like soldiers in the trenches on the front line. All we heard were the orders of our commanders, without the details of why: the business case, what users actually needed. So we focused on the one thing we could see, the process of software design and development, in a vain pursuit of perfection.
It took me years, and a progression to higher rungs, to see that technical excellence was only a contributing factor. The merit of the idea and the quality of the requirements mattered far more. I had been doing excellent work inside a circle that was far too small. I have written about where that realisation eventually led me in After 17 years as a CTO, I learned the engineering was the easy part.
The circles
Picture the circles from the inside out.
The innermost is your own work: your tasks for today, this week, this month. Most of us are measured here, and many of us stop here.
The next circle out is helping your team be more successful, and growing its importance within the company. Making you and your immediate colleagues more successful, and more secure in your jobs and your financial future.
Further still is helping your company or organisation navigate the uncertainty, predict risks and navigate around them, and ensure its survival and growth as a tribe.
Think of a band of prehistoric humans hunting a mammoth. Nobody brings it down alone. The hunter who only watches his own spear, and never the herd, the terrain or the weather, puts the whole tribe at risk. Everyone has to give their best, and everyone has to see the whole hunt.
The outermost circle is your impact on the people around you and on the world: your contribution to the wellbeing of others.
The hospital cleaners who left their circle
There is good research on what happens when people reach beyond the first circle. Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton studied the cleaning staff of a large hospital and found two groups doing, on paper, the same job (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, Academy of Management Review, 2001).
The first group stuck to the job description. They described the work as not very skilled. The second group did all the same tasks, but also, on their own initiative, supported nurses, patients and visitors. They noticed which patients had not had a visitor for several shifts, and doubled back to spend time with them. One cleaner on a long-term rehabilitation floor regularly rearranged the art prints in the rooms of comatose patients, in the hope that a change of surroundings might spark something and speed their recovery. None of it was in her job description (Wrzesniewski on NPR's Hidden Brain).
That second group described the same job as highly skilled work that would be hard for anyone else to take over. The researchers called it job crafting. Same shifts, same tenure, same units. What differed was how far each person chose to take responsibility.
The contracts that were not my job
Years after the trenches, I found myself on the other side of that lesson. As Chief Product & Technology Officer at NHS Wales, commercial contracts were not in my role description. I decided to do that job anyway.
I dug deep into the commercial contracts and the system specifications behind them, and found £1M of wastage. Then I designed a better alternative, and we stopped it.
It was not my circle, and that is precisely the point. In a public health service, £1M of waste is not an abstraction. It is money that is not reaching patient care. I have written more about that transformation programme here.
More ownership, not more hours
This is where the idea is easy to get wrong. Widening your circle does not mean working more hours. Long hours spent on the minimum are still the minimum.
More means more ownership, more imagination and more care about the outcome. It means thinking about the problem behind the task, not only the task. The hospital cleaner did not work a longer shift. She saw a bigger job inside the same shift.
There is a warning in the research, too. A 2015 study of 273 employees found that going beyond your role leaves people worn out when they feel little support from their organisation, and when they feel pressured into it. Where support and team relationships were strong and pressure was low, the extra effort did not exhaust people in the same way. And the fatigue mattered: it predicted less extra effort later (Bolino and colleagues, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2015).
So ownership has to be chosen. It cannot be extracted. Which brings us to the organisation's half of the deal.
The organisation's half of the deal
Many managers and team members think in local terms, focusing on what is right in front of them and rarely taking a helicopter view. Sometimes that is a pragmatic choice: the project definition and objectives are above their pay grade, so they focus on what they can control.
But if people are not allowed to speak up, or freely challenge their managers for fear of some form of punishment, even a subtle one, the organisation is missing something important. It is asking people to own outcomes they are not allowed to see or question. I wrote about why the best companies treat psychological safety as a hard operating requirement, not a soft one.
If you lead people, share the why: the business case, the customer, the risks. Make challenge safe. And back the people who reach further, because without support their ownership turns into fatigue.
And if you are the one reaching further, and your growth and influence scare your superiors, that is a sign you are in the wrong place. More on that later in this series.
How to widen your circle
You start from your own circle. You use your knowledge and imagination to reach further out. A few practical ways to begin:
- Learn the why. For your current piece of work, find out the business case and who it is for. If nobody can tell you, that is useful information too.
- Meet the user. In my early years we were separated from end users by several layers of management, on both sides. Remove a layer if you can.
- Ask what keeps your manager awake. Then ask what keeps the company awake this year. Some part of that is yours to help with.
- Look outwards and inwards. Spot the trends and risks heading your way. Identify your own gaps, and close them with new skills and knowledge.
Then come back to your own area of responsibility. What else could you do to navigate around the obstacles and reach for a greater prize? Are you focusing on the right thing? Should it be expanded, or shifted?
Do this consistently and something compounds. You become more impactful and influential, more respected and more appreciated. Your team and your company become more successful too, especially if others share the same ethic and personal responsibility becomes part of the culture.
Your job description is the floor
Your job description tells you where your responsibility starts. It was never meant to tell you where it ends.
A few questions worth sitting with this week:
- Do you know the business case for what you are working on right now?
- What is your company most worried about this year, and which part of it could you own?
- When did you last talk to the people who use what you build?
- Who in your team is quietly working in a bigger circle than their title, and have you noticed?
The philosophy behind this series is here. Next, I will look at why the minimum is a habit too.
If you are building a team where people take ownership beyond their job descriptions, I would be glad to compare notes. Let's talk.
Related: Your ceiling is higher than you think · After 17 years as a CTO, I learned the engineering was the easy part · How big tech wins the talent war, and it isn't the money · Fractional CTO services
