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The Team Delivered

By Jon McAnnis

Membership, not ownership

When the work ships, I say the team delivered. Not “my team delivered.”

This isn’t a criticism of leaders who say “my team.” Most of them mean it as pride and care. They are proud of the people they work with, and the phrase is how that comes out. I understand that, and I don’t think it makes anyone a bad leader.

I choose different words for one reason. A leader is a member of the team. The role is different and the responsibilities are different, but it is still membership, not ownership. The words we use about the team should match that, especially because of how they land for the people hearing them.

How it sounds from the other seat

Picture an analyst who spent three weekends on a data migration. At the all-hands, a vice president says “my team pulled this off.” The VP means it as praise. The analyst may hear that the work, and the people who did it, belong to someone else.

“My” is the word we use for things we own: my car, my house. Applied to people, it can put the leader at the center of a story that belongs to the group. Armand Emamdjomeh, an engineering manager at The Washington Post, made this case in a 2023 talk at RedMonk’s Monktoberfest conference. He argued that calling people “my team” implies they belong to the manager, which can limit their agency and tie the team’s identity to one person (RedMonk).

None of this requires bad intent. Most of us picked up our leadership vocabulary from the leaders we worked for. Empathy runs both ways here: for the people hearing the words, and for the leaders who never thought about how they sound.

What volleyball taught me

I played volleyball for 20 years and coached many teams. I used the same rule on the court that I use at work. After a match, the volleyball team won. Never “my team won.”

Volleyball makes the point hard to miss. A player can’t touch the ball twice in a row, so every rally depends on someone else. As a coach, I wrote practice plans, set lineups, called timeouts, and decided what got said in the huddle. That is a real role, and a team needs it. It is still one role on the team. The players made the passes, the sets, and the kills.

Coaches at the top of other sports have landed in the same place. When Kevin O’Connell took over the Minnesota Vikings, the team put a shield in the players’ entry hallway that reads “Our team. Our way. Our process.” (Minnesota Vikings). At Kansas State, receiver Dalton Schoen said head coach Chris Klieman’s message was that it is the players’ program, and that this sense of ownership pushes players to play harder (K-State Athletics).

What the research says

This is more than style. Social psychologists call it identity leadership. In The New Psychology of Leadership, Alex Haslam, Stephen Reicher and Michael Platow draw on two decades of research to argue that leaders succeed when they build a shared sense of “us” and are seen as part of it, not above it (The New Psychology of Leadership).

The practical fix is small. Emamdjomeh suggests saying “our team” or naming the team by its mission instead (RedMonk).

A member with a different role

Saying “the team” does not mean the leader disappears. A CIO sets direction and makes the calls on budget and priority. A setter runs the offense. Those roles carry weight, and the people in them should own that weight.

That ownership matters most when things go wrong. Leif Babin of Echelon Front tells leaders to give the team credit with “we” and to own a failure with “I”: “We didn’t perform well, and that’s my fault” (Echelon Front). I think that is the right split. The team delivers. The leader owns the miss that sits in the leader’s role.

Owning the miss does not mean the CIO accepts the outcome. It means working with the team to understand what went wrong and to keep it from happening again.

“We” should never be a place to hide. It is a statement about who did the work and who shares in the result.

How this shapes the way I lead technology

The same belief runs through how I work as a CIO and CTO. Technology leaders sit at the top of an org chart, and that makes the “my team” habit easy to fall into. The work tells a different story.

In agile delivery, the team makes the commitment, not the leader. At one organization, a dozen teams ran quarterly planning through a five-quarter EMR rebuild and completed 98% of what they committed to. Those were the teams’ commitments, and the teams kept them. My part was keeping priorities clear and moving obstacles out of the way.

The same goes for the business. When we built a provider data mastering program at a health plan, the rules for which source system wins were defined in partnership with the business. Technology did not hand them down. The people who live with the data every day were members of that team too.

It also shapes how I handle risk. In every CIO and CTO role, I bring in an outside assessor for the security risk assessment. A team that grades its own work misses things, and the leader is part of that team, not exempt from it.

This matters even more in fractional work. As a fractional CIO or CTO through Groundwork, I join a team that was there before me and will be there after me. Calling it “my team” would be wrong on the facts. The job is to strengthen the team so it delivers without me in the room.

Try it for a week

For one week, listen for “my” when you talk about the people you lead. Swap it for “the team,” “our team,” or the team’s name. When something goes well, name the people who did it. When something goes wrong in your part of the work, say “I.”

You may find it feels awkward at first. The people around you will notice anyway.

Sources

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Written by Jon McAnnis, Principal Advisor at Groundwork Technology Advisors.