“We gave it our best shot. The team worked incredibly hard. Everyone put in long hours. We tried everything we could think of. You can’t fault the effort.”
And then the project fails anyway. The deadline gets missed. The client walks away. The initiative gets canceled.
The team gets praised for trying. The manager gets sympathy for the difficult situation. Everyone feels good about the effort while the organization absorbs the cost of the failure.
I watched this play out during a critical system migration project that I was leading. The team was putting in sixty-hour weeks. We had daily standups, weekly reviews, and constant communication. Everyone was engaged, motivated, and working harder than I’d ever seen. The energy was incredible.
But three weeks before the deadline, I realized we weren’t going to make it. The scope had grown gradually, technical challenges had proven more complex than anticipated, and despite all our effort, we simply weren’t on track to deliver what we’d promised.
My first instinct was to focus on the effort: “Look how hard we’re working. See how committed everyone is. You can’t question our dedication.” I prepared a presentation about all the hours invested, all the obstacles we’d encountered, all the creative solutions we’d attempted.
Then I stopped myself. This is what happens when leaders own effort instead of outcomes. And it’s why most leadership fails when it matters most.
The harsh reality hit me: Organizations don’t pay for effort. Markets don’t reward trying. Customers don’t care how hard you worked if they don’t get what they need. All our effort was admirable, but it wasn’t going to prevent the business impact of missing our deadline.
That’s when I learned the difference between effort ownership and outcome ownership. Effort is easier to own because it’s within your control. You can always work harder, put in more hours, show more dedication. Effort feels noble and generates sympathy when things don’t work out.
Outcomes are messier. They depend on factors you can’t control. They require difficult decisions about scope, resources, people, and priorities. They demand that you take responsibility for results, not just attempts.
But here’s what I discovered: When you own outcomes, you don’t just manage effort, you create success. You make the hard decisions that ensure delivery, not just the comfortable ones that feel collaborative. You ask “What will it take to succeed?” rather than “How hard can we try?”
The world doesn’t need more people who try hard. It needs more people who take responsibility for making things work.