Rule #11: It’s Your Fault

Remember Samir from Rule #1? So, once him and I are going out for a coffee after we concluded our project together. He asks for an update on how things are going, and without realizing I start complaining about few things going in a wrong direction. Very lightly and without even a shadow of blame, Samir states; yeah, sounds like your fault. I don't know if you ever witness a guy in a suit spitting a hazelnut milk cappuccino (is that thing even real?) in coffee shop, but it wasn't pleasant - I can assure you of that. My fault, I thought? What the hell is he talking about?

The Part Nobody Likes About Leadership

What made that sentence irritating wasn’t the rudeness. My friend didn’t accuse me, didn’t lecture me, didn’t even put a dramatic pause before saying it. He dropped it casually, the way you’d comment on the weather, and went back to his coffee. Somewhere between “it’s cold today” and “pass me the sugar”.

And that’s exactly why it hit.

Because leadership has this quiet rule that most people only learn after they get the title: the higher you go, the less interested the world becomes in your explanations. People don’t want to hear how many dependencies you had, how many moving parts, how many “yes, but…” reasons. They want one thing: an outcome. And if the outcome isn’t there, they instinctively look at the person who was supposed to own it.

In a team, success spreads. When things go well, it’s “great job everyone,” and that’s fair. It should be shared. But when things go wrong, responsibility doesn’t spread, it lands on someone’s desk, and very often that desk has a nameplate that says “manager.” That’s not a romantic idea not how this should work in some idealistic work. It’s just the mechanics your day to day interactions.

Extreme Ownership, Minus the Navy SEAL Poster

This is basically what Jocko Willink calls Extreme Ownership. If you remove the military background and the discipline aesthetic, the principle becomes surprisingly simple: if you’re the leader, you own what happens. Not because you personally wrote every email or made every call, but because you’re the person who shaped the environment where those emails and calls happened.

You hired. You set priorities. You decided what “good” looks like. You tolerated certain habits. You didn’t tolerate others. You gave clarity or you didn’t. You followed up or you assumed. You created pace or you let things drift.

Maybe it wasn’t your mistake. But it is still your responsibility and it was your fault. And no, “fault” and “blame” are two completely different words bearing completely different meaning.

Fault, Blame, Accountability — the Messy Dictionary in Our Heads

When someone says “it’s your fault,” the brain immediately translates it into: “you’re being blamed.” And blame is emotional. Blame feels personal. Blame needs a culprit and a courtroom speech.

But fault, in leadership, is much more boring than that. Fault is operational. Fault is simply a recognition that the situation sits in your world and therefore you’re the one who has to carry it forward. A failure in the system which needs to be studied and adjusted for future iterations.

Accountability is what happens after the concept of “fault”, something that you accept willingly. Blame is what people do when they don’t know how to move forward and they want relief. A good leader doesn’t play the blame game, because blame makes everyone shrink. It makes people careful in the worst way. They stop taking risks, they start protecting themselves, they start sharing only those things that could “fly under radar”. Then you find yourselves in one of the worst places where manager can land: managing out of fear, rather than managing out of love.

Why Leaders Take the Heat and Give Away the Applause

There’s an old leadership “deal” that no one signs but everyone expects you to follow: you take the blame and you share the success.

Again, not because you’re a saint. Because it works.

If you absorb the pressure, your team can stay focused on solving. If you push the pressure down, your team will focus on surviving. That’s when meetings become political, decision-making becomes slow, and everybody starts asking, “Who will be blamed for this?” instead of, “How do we fix it?”. The best leaders I’ve worked with didn’t waste much time explaining why something wasn’t their fault. They didn’t even enjoy taking the hit. They just understood that leadership isn’t only about strategy and motivation; sometimes it’s about being the shock absorber.

What This Looks Like on a Random Tuesday

Most of the time this rule isn’t tested by dramatic failures. It’s tested by small, annoying things that pile up. A deadline slips, or a stakeholder being unhappy, or sometimes an aAplayer on your team suddenly starts underpeforming. A project becomes slow and weird and nobody can quite explain why.

In moments like that, you can do two very different things:

You can zoom in and start hunting: who dropped the ball, who didn’t follow up, who misunderstood the brief. This approach feels satisfying for about ten minutes, until the team becomes silent and cautious and starts writing defensive narratives.

Or you can zoom out and ask a more uncomfortable question: what part of this system did I allow to exist? What did I not clarify early enough? Where did I assume alignment when there wasn’t any? What did I tolerate because it was easier than confronting it? What did I postpone because I didn’t want to have the awkward conversation?

Back to the (spilled) coffee

Looking back, I don’t even think Samir was trying to teach me. He wasn’t performing wisdom. He was just reflecting the reality I was describing, but from a perspective I didn’t want to take. My irritation that morning had nothing to do with his words and everything to do with the fact that he took away my favorite luxury: plausible deniability.

Because once you accept the rule, you can’t hide behind “circumstances” anymore. You can’t stay in complaint mode and have to do the only thing leadership actually demands: carry it forward. A lot of management advice tries to make leadership feel glamorous: vision, inspiration, charisma. The truth is much more practical. Leadership is often just ownership, repeated daily, especially when it’s uncomfortable. You don’t get the title and only the pleasant parts of responsibility. You get the whole thing. If it’s in your area, if it’s under your team, if it’s under your watch — it’s yours to handle, even if you didn’t personally cause it.

That’s the rule.

It’s your fault.