The Leader Owns All the Problems

Something goes wrong on your safety team. A post sits empty during second service. A volunteer waves through a guest he should have stopped. A check-in tag gets handed to the wrong parent. Your first instinct is to find out who messed up.

Wrong instinct. The leader owns it.

That is Extreme Ownership (the book by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, and the whole idea is that the leader owns all the problems). Not most of them. All of them. When my team fails, I don't start by asking what is wrong with my people. I start by looking in the mirror.

Here is why that matters more on a church safety team than almost anywhere else. These are volunteers. I didn't hire them and I can't fire them like employees. They show up on a Sunday morning when they could be sitting in the service with their families. The only thing that holds a team like that together is trust, and nothing builds trust faster than a leader who takes the hit instead of handing it out.

So when a post goes uncovered, I run the questions on myself first.

• Did I make the standard clear, or did I assume they knew?
• Did I train them for that exact situation, or did I train them for the easy version and hope?
• Did I put the right person in the right spot, or did I fill a hole and move on?
• Did I write any of it down, so we could actually learn from it? (For years, I didn't. That one is on me, and I'm still working on it.)

Nine times out of ten, the breakdown traces back to one of those, and every one of them is mine.

"Ownership is not guilt, it's control."

This is not about beating yourself up. It's the opposite. Ownership is not guilt, it's control. If the problem is my people, I'm stuck waiting on them to change. If the problem is my training, my standard, or my plan, I can fix that this week. Owning it is the only version of the story where I get to do something about it.

It is also, frankly, Biblical. We talk a lot about servant leadership in the church and then lead our teams like middle managers looking for someone to write up.

"The shepherd does not blame the sheep. He owns the flock."

A safety team is a ministry, and the person leading it answers for it the same way.

Now the flip side. Owning the problem does not mean excusing it. There is a difference between "I failed to train you" and "you knew better and chose not to." Extreme Ownership starts with me, but it does not end with lowering the bar. You still coach. You still hold the standard. You still, when it comes to it, release someone off the team. But you do all of that from a posture of "what did I miss first," and your people can feel the difference.

When you lead this way, something changes in the room. People stop hiding mistakes, because they are not afraid you will hang them with them. They bring you the near-miss instead of burying it. And a team that surfaces its problems early is a team that gets better fast. That is the entire game.

Part of owning the problem is owning whether your team was set up to win in the first place. Clear standards. Real training. A way to track who is current and who is not, and a record of what actually happened when it happened. If your people fail because the system around them was held together with good intentions and a group text, that is not their failure. It is yours, and it is fixable.

Here is the part nobody tells you:

"Owning all the problems does not mean carrying them alone."

I don't. I lean on Christ first, then on my senior pastor, my trusted leaders, and a circle of friends who will tell me the truth. A leader who tries to carry it all solo burns out or gets prideful, usually both. Ownership means the weight stops with you, not that you bear it by yourself.

To sum up: when it goes wrong, look in the mirror first. Own the training, own the standard, own the plan, own the documentation. Hold the bar, and take the weight off your team. Not by carrying it alone, but by leaning where a leader is supposed to lean: on Christ, your pastor, and the people who lead alongside you. Do that consistently and you will build a team that runs through a wall for you, because they know you would do the same for them.

That is the job. Protect the people so the church can do its real work, and own every part of it that is yours to own. All of it.