Level of Commitment, and Ownership

Working at a tech company as an IC (individual contributor), I’ve heard the word “ownership” a lot. While you’re progressing in your career, you’re expected to own more, and to a greater extent. This has similar spirit to the line, “With great power, comes great responsibility” (Y’all watched the movie yet?!). There’re already a lot of good articles explaining what ownership means in one’s career, but I want to share some thoughts based on a recent conversation with my life coach.

We were having a conversation around my vision, where I was asked to pick some of my core values to construct an ideal world, and build a short narrative around it.

Personal values provide an internal reference for what is good, beneficial, important, useful, beautiful, desirable and constructive. Values are one of the factors that generate behavior (besides needs, interests and habits) and influence the choices made by an individual.

Now, this might start to sound a bit philosophical but to put it in plain words, your vision is what makes you who you are and what kind of person you want to be. It generates your behavior because it is your internal guide and consultant. Admittedly, there are times that your behavior doesn’t perfectly serve your vision, and sometimes even goes against it. At any given time, there’s the full spectrum of level of commitment, that tells you how hard you’re working towards your vision, and how much you’re willing to give.

Here goes the 6 levels of commitment, starting from the one where a person is least commited, in an ascending order:

1. Individual

You don’t care about others. You live in your own world and do whatever you feel like doing that makes you feel good.

2. Follower

You follow what others do. You’re feeling and emotion driven. When you feel good about something, you’ll go ahead and do it, but when it goes sideways, you’ll shut down the pain and discomfort.

3. The Involved

This is the level of people that you start finding agreeable. They take actions but they’re not self-generated. Most of the time, they need a nudge to start doing something. This is also the level where one stays in their comfort zone, most of the time.

1. The Immersed

You’re aligned with the vision. You often have a burst of energy and make a big splash from time to time, but it’s also usually followed with fizzling. Failure distracts you and you often make excuses, e.g. “My pet needs taken care of”, “I don’t have enough time”, etc.

5. Leader

At this point you are fully enrolled and inspired by the vision. You’ll start to feel strong ownership towards the vision. Often times, you’ll say - “It’s up to me”, or “I’ll go first”. You always take measurable actions. Obstacle and failure is only to be reinterpreted or destroyed. You will not find excuse unless it’s under emergency or you go into the survival mode.

6. Source

You, are the vision. You generate the source 24/7, and you never make excuses.

I was mostly rephrasing what my coach said but I found so much power when I reflected on it. Truthfully, one cannot operate at the “Source” level all the time. As a matter of fact, we fluctuate, and we go back and forth in this spectrum. But in the brief time when we operate at the Leader or the Source level, we generate the majority of our achievements, which is similar to the famous 80/20 rule.

When I look back at this spectrum, this resonates a lot with my past career progression and feels really close to a good explanation of what ownership is:

You define and own your vision, and you constantly generate it. Not only that, you also tirelessly pave your way to march towards your vision, without excuses.

I’ve found it a good exercise to reflect on it constantly (if not daily) and I hope you find it somewhat inspiring.