A few weeks ago, I was on a coaching call with a Chief of Staff at a fast-scaling company. He's one of the most respected operators I work with. He's sharp and even-keeled, the kind of person every founder wishes they had two of.

He said:

He went on and elaborated some more:

"I’ve stepped back from GTM to give other people room to spearhead meaningful initiatives and share the burden. I’m owning the entire partnerships stack, but there’s a lot that I own in there that I shouldn’t own. I’m helping a peer on business development. But mostly, I’m filling gaps wherever I can see them."

"It's kind of a weird role, to be honest," he said.

What was sad to hear, but not surprising for a second, was that he could not tell me in concrete terms what he was actually responsible for. Even though he is one of the smartest, most capable operators I’ve ever worked with, even he felt paralyzed by the ambiguity of his role.

This lack of clarity resulted in him feeling pretty apathetic, because there wasn’t a clear idea of what success actually looked like.

I wish I could tell you I waved my magic fairy coaching wand and he found his purpose and defined success in the span of one call. But we didn’t - this isn’t something you fix in 60 minutes.

That being said, naming the problem out loud was the first proactive step he’d made on the problem in months.

Afterwards, he told me, “Just being able to say that I’m the owner of everything and the owner of nothing was cathartic.”

Pragmatically speaking, it also helped him realize that he had to stop reflexively catching every dropped ball.

Now, he could at least ask the question: is this gap actually mine to fill, or am I filling it because I'm the only one who sees it?

The Diffusion of Ownership

When you are the owner of everything and the owner of nothing, you have a Diffusion of Ownership. This is what happens when a company moves fast enough that role definitions get sacrificed for speed:

• Nobody decides who owns what. People figure it out in real time.

• People just grab work that needs doing.

• Leaders fill gaps because they're the only ones who can see them.

• Strategic shifts happen in conversation but never get written down.

• Everyone is doing their best, and the org starts feeling slower and slower for reasons nobody can quite point to.

These are all very necessary for early-stage startups, but it can’t last forever. Diffusion of ownership doesn't show up as one big problem. It shows up as a hundred small symptoms.

The most capable people on your team are the most vulnerable to this dynamic. They see the gap, they fill it, and the work becomes theirs by inheritance, not by choice.

Here is what I've come to believe after watching dozens of versions of this pattern play out:

The Diffusion of Ownership is almost never one person's failure. It's the result of three things compounding.

1. Speed gets prioritized over clarity at small scale.

   When you have 8 people in the same room, who owns what is obvious. When you have 30 people across three time zones, the same assumptions silently break. Nobody sees the moment it stops working.

2. Leaders fill gaps because they're the only ones who can see them.

   Founders and senior operators have the highest contextual awareness of any single person in the company. When something is dropping, they catch it. Catching it once is leadership. Catching it twenty times in a row is how you become the owner of everything, and the owner of nothing.

3. Swim lanes feel territorial to talk about. 

   Naming who owns what feels like a corporate move, like you're putting up fences in a place that used to feel like a co-op. Nobody wants to be the person who says, "Hey, can we draw a line around what's yours and what's mine?" So they don't.

The diffusion is a side effect of growth, and your team is not dysfunctional for being in it. They're scaling, and this is a good thing. But you’ll want to have a good process in place once it’s time to fix this.

How to fix this without starting a turf war

Most founders skip the structural fix because it sounds boring compared to the chaos of the current state. But boring is what compounds.

Here is the sequence I walk my clients through.

The question to sit with

When I look at the companies I work with that are scaling well, the common thread is structural. They've done the unglamorous work of saying out loud, in writing, who owns what. The messy ones have just as much talent. They just never paused to write it down.

This is good news, because it's fixable in a single week if you decide to do it.

So I'll leave you with this:

If you had to write down right now, on paper, exactly what each person on your team owns, where would you stall?

Get on it, and write it down.

Until next time,

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