Kristiana Corona
To deliver results that truly matter at Amazon or any other company, you have to act like an owner. You have to act like a founder of a startup. That means not just caring about your piece of the work, but caring about the results of the broader organization. Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go?
I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside, but on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results.
Now I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out.
Hey there, and welcome back to The Worthy To Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona, and I'm so glad you're here. So today, we are gonna be doing part three of my miniseries on leadership lessons that I learned while working at Amazon. And today is about extreme ownership, and it's a big one. It's the difference between showing up at work and just letting the current sweep you along versus deciding to own the process and the results, and the impact as if you are the owner of the business.
If you're feeling tossed around by constantly shifting priorities and you're unsure if you're having a real impact, this episode is for you. So here's the bottom line. To deliver results that truly matter at Amazon or any other company, you have to act like an owner. You have to act like a founder of a startup.
That means not just caring about your piece of the work, but caring about the results of the broader organization. This is not about pitching theoretical ideas and then walking away, but rather shepherding those ideas through from concept all the way through to execution. Until you get results in the real world, you won't always get it right every time.
Real leaders who show ownership, they don't give up. They keep coming back again and again. They are relentless about learning and continuing to try. At Amazon, one of the core leadership principles is ownership. Jeff Bezos describes it like this. Leaders are owners; they think long-term, and they don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.
They act on behalf of the entire company, not just their own team. They never say, that's not my job. That's the standard. And honestly, it changes everything when you work that way. Let's talk about what that looks like in action. So to me, extreme ownership really looks like this. It's about taking something from vision all the way through to execution, even when it's not in your job description.
It's about filling the gaps and really understanding what is it gonna take to get this thing across the finish line. And if you have to roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work, then you do it. It's about connecting your work back to the goals, back to the OKRs. Really understanding the metrics and the customer success measures.
It's about facing failure without giving up. So like we talked about before, retaining that sense of optimism in the sake of learning, and it's about advocating for your work over and over again. Even when that means you have to pitch your work 30 different times to 30 different teams just to get a single yes.
This level of ownership is not easy. It will stretch you. It will challenge you, it will frustrate you. But when you learn to operate that way and you look back on the things that you were able to build because of this level of ownership, you will not ever wanna go back to working any other way again. So let me share three quick stories that sort of illustrate what this looks like in action.
The first story, we're gonna call her Maddie. This is about leading without authority. So Maddie was a senior designer. She was deeply experienced; however, she had never held a formal leadership title, never managed a team. She was tasked with a high-stakes challenge. To lead a redesign of a complex app that was used by thousands of people, and it required coordination between more than 30 cross-functional teams and all kinds of legacy tech stacks.
This was a big deal, and here's the kicker. Maddie had no authority. She didn't have anyone reporting to her. She was never given a formal permission slip to say, okay, this is how you're going to lead. She never had led anything at this scale, to be honest, but this is the important part. She knew how high-stakes this was, and she made a decision she was going to treat the success of this redesign as if it was dependent on her alone.
She took full responsibility. From day one, she started out by focusing on the things where she had credibility and experience already. So for her, that was the design. So she understood the user pain points. She did interviews. She understood backend constraints and worked with engineers to really look at, you know, what was it that they were dealing with.
And she built a compelling vision that was rooted in those deep needs. She didn't wait for permission. She proposed some bold ideas and began to build alignment across the organization, and then what happens every time was devastating. The resources for this project. She got funding, she got alignment, but the resources for this project uphold, and halfway through, they were left scrambling.
And you know, everyone was panicking. What are we gonna do? How are we going to deliver this work? But Manny didn't panic, and she didn't point any fingers. She rolled up her sleeves, she dug in with the team and help them to reprioritize what they were going to deliver. That was actually gonna bring value to the customers.
And she renegotiated with leaders to map out a path forward. She didn't shy away from senior leaders. She reached up two and three levels above her to gather input, to unblock issues, and to help make sure the work was executed smoothly. And because Maddie had a full view of the work from strategy to design, to technical execution, to all the different stakeholder needs, she was able to very confidently speak to the work and answer any of those tough executive questions that came her way.
In the end, the redesign was a successful multi-year effort that improved the user experience dramatically and saved the company millions of dollars. So here's what Maddie learned. Regardless of your title, you can influence up, you can gain alignment across teams, and you can lead with ownership by rallying people around a bold vision and seeing it through from the beginning to the end.
My second story is about someone I'll call Stephanie, and this is about thinking beyond the job description. So Stephanie was a mid-level designer who saw huge pain points in the physical workflow of her users. And even though she was only tasked with designing for things on a screen or in an app, she knew that her team could have a much bigger impact if they looked at the holistic workflow, including the physical and all the digital aspects together.
The workflow was so disjointed and it was inefficient, and it was full of bottlenecks, and it just needed a complete overhaul. However, her team had been told in the past, you're not allowed to work on physical workflows. This is not your scope. So they had stopped asking, but Stephanie didn't buy that. She boldly went forward and created a proposal that showed the impact of doing a redesign of this full workflow.
She created prototypes and she found a few advocates within the operations and the workforce teams who are willing to do experiments with her. She encouraged the team to think big and to put aside their doubts in service of learning instead of demanding sweeping changes where everything needed to change; she framed it all as a low-risk pilot.
Hey, we're just gonna try some things. We're gonna learn and we're gonna iterate. The first pilot flopped, so they ran into several unforeseen challenges. There were safety concerns, and the tech was not working the way that they expected. Some of the partners started to panic, and there was talk of pulling the plug, but Stephanie kept asking If this doesn't work, what else might, and instead of taking no for an answer, she role modeled what it looked like to remain open and curious, and then she prompted others to do the same.
She collaborated with engineers and ops leads to redesign the approach to test brand new flows, to document everything that they were learning, and to show up on site to observe and troubleshoot what was happening in the moment. Each experiment taught them more, and their confidence started to grow. And soon, the people who were blockers and the people who were doubting on the sidelines started to become excited champions as they saw what was possible.
Eventually, the team landed on a solution that worked seamlessly across physical and digital experiences, and the customer feedback was glowing. They confirmed that it was far better than the original experience with strong metrics. And happy users. Now, executives were eager to give them the green light to roll this functionality out across the entire network in the same year.
So here's what Stephanie learned. Even without formal authority, you can drive big results. When you collaborate with others, you frame your ideas as experiments, and you refuse to give up. Ownership is built through persistence, not permission. Alright, story number three. Is about someone I'll call Sam, and this is about turning vision into momentum.
Sam was a principal designer. He was well respected. He was highly strategic and full of big ideas. He would float what if scenarios that really inspired people, but somehow those ideas seemed to just fade into the background. As soon as the teams went back to their desks and got busy with their roadmaps and their priorities, Sam found this to be very frustrating.
Until eventually he realized, you know what? There's a real possibility that no one is going to take these ideas forward. And even if they did, I probably wouldn't like the way they were being executed. So he started taking the reins. He drafted a proposal for one of his most compelling ideas, and he just casually started sharing it around with cross-functional partners.
And through each conversation, he started to learn what were the pain points that mattered the most. Where were some of these blockers that people couldn't seem to get through, and where did his ideas need to evolve? So there were dozens of conversations that followed and dozens of nos, and not yet, but then just when he was about ready to give up, one day, a team said yes.
They saw the alignment between their current roadmap and how his idea could help propel them forward, and they were willing to experiment. Sam enthusiastically dove in. He got scrappy. He mocked up rough prototypes. He took very complex workflows and simulated them by doing them manually in the back with bubble gum and duct tape.
And he partnered with the team to just learn on the fly to see if the idea would work. That pilot. Became his proof point. He took it to other teams, other teams who had previously said no to him, and he showed them what was possible. Each case study turned into a story that he could tell the next team, and over time, his idea began to snowball as more and more teams saw the value and they began to say yes.
These teams asked for different variations on his idea, based on their unique needs. And so he had to continuously adapt his idea to fit into these different use cases that he had never thought of originally. And the great thing about this is that strengthened his proposal even more with real-world results.
Eventually, he started pitching his ideas up and getting more executive leaders involved at higher levels. The excitement spread. Leaders began instructing their teams to get involved with SAM and to start exploring how this could work for them. Today, Sam's idea continues to gain momentum and will likely become a major disruptor in the industry.
So here's what Sam learned. Relentless advocacy matters, and it works even when the answer is no again and again. Each conversation helps you to tell a better story, and when you keep showing up, you will eventually get a yes. That is the heart of an entrepreneurial leader. I share these stories as examples of what extreme ownership can look like inside of an organization.
You don't have to own your business to treat your work. Like an owner. None of these people had formal power or leadership titles, but they had something better. They had belief in their work. They had a willingness to lead and the courage to keep going even when it got hard. Now, here's the part that most leaders miss.
This impact doesn't come from micromanagement or from rigid direction. In each of these cases, as their leader, I was not directing them on what to do here. I was leveraging the power of coaching. I was listening. I was asking thoughtful questions. I was helping them to refine and challenge their thinking so that they could take clear and bold action.
I shared my insights and ideas along the way, but I did it in such a way that they felt like they were still in the driver's seat, and that is the magic of coaching. When someone owns the idea, they will also own the execution. No matter what level of skill or experience the people on your team have, anyone can develop leadership skills, strategic thinking, and a high sense of ownership.
I have seen it happen at all levels, from junior all the way to the most senior. If you wanna start developing extreme ownership in your team or within yourself, I would recommend checking out a couple of resources. First, I would grab a copy of my 15-minute coaching guide at worthytolead.co. This will walk you through exactly how to coach your team into stronger ownership without micromanaging and without becoming the bottleneck.
And the second would be to watch a video called Greatness by David Marquette. It beautifully explains the difference between giving direction and giving intent, and how that shift unlocks massive growth within people. Whether you're manning a nuclear submarine or leading in a corporate environment, you don't have to aimlessly drift through your career.
You're here to make a real difference. And when you lead like an owner and you coach your team to think like founders, you'll do just that. Thanks for listening, and as always, keep showing up. Keep doing the work that matters and keep leading like you're worthy to lead because you are. Bye for now.
