How to put ownership back where it belongs without a single ball dropping

If you are the person who writes the recap, pushes the deliverable along and reminds the group about deadlines, you are doing work the room never notices and will rarely reward. Research from McKinsey and LeanIn in their 2025 Women in the Workplace report shows that women in leadership roles are roughly twice as likely as their male peers to be mistaken for a junior employee. Follow-up work is part of the reason. Whoever chases the tasks tends to be seen as the one assisting them, not the one accountable for them.

None of this says anything negative about you as a person. It grew out of a pattern: when something slipped, you caught it, and over time the team came to expect you would. Read through the ten statements that follow and notice how much responsibility belonging to other people has quietly moved onto your desk. Count how many you answer yes to.

SHORT Your tally sheet

Part A You send the meeting recap even though no one asked you to.

Part B Across the past four weeks, you have gently pushed a teammate in West Hartford toward a deadline several times.

Part C Whenever something is behind schedule, you are the person who notices first and then goes after it.

Part D You keep a running spreadsheet that records what other people have promised to deliver.

Part E A colleague praised you as "so organized" at the same moment they passed you another assignment.

Part F Rather than wait for the person responsible, you have quietly completed a task yourself.

Part G Before the current meeting wraps up, you schedule the next check-in, since you know no one else will.

Part H Your manager regularly asks you for status reports on projects that aren't yours.

Part I You have said sorry for checking in on someone's work.

Part J Should you stop following up for a fortnight, you are convinced that at least one thing would collapse.

A total of zero to three affirmative answers marks you as the one who owns the work rather than the one chasing it.

You keep tabs on your own responsibilities and let everyone else manage theirs. Keep doing that. The habit worth protecting: when a meeting wraps up, ask, "Who owns the next step, and when is it due?" then let the pause do its job. It is the owner who should say out loud that the work belongs to them.

Four to six: the safety net for Manchester teams

Colleagues let balls drop because they count on you to notice and catch them. Your next step: in your next meeting, when action items are read aloud, take none that are not yours, and put each owner and date in the written recap. The hard part comes next: stop chasing. Let one item drop in public. A single missed deadline does less damage than being known around Hartford as the team's reminder service.

Seven to ten yeses makes you the project manager nobody hired.

On top of your own job, you have been running the team's coordination, and no one is compensating you for that labor. Your next step: list every item you are currently chasing and the person who owns each one. Send that list to your manager along with one sentence: "Here's what I've been tracking for others. I plan to hand these back to their owners this week." Let me know if you want me to keep any of them." You have made the invisible labor visible and put the decision back on someone else's desk, where it belongs.

Why the ball keeps getting caught

The worry is that returning ownership to others will lead to failure. Things actually fail when ownership is unclear, and the person who chases is frequently the reason it stays unclear. State who owns the task and when it is due, and say both openly so the whole group hears them. Clear ownership does more of the catching than you ever could, and it never needs a reminder.

Post your total and name the single follow-up you have let go, as Glastonbury peers might do.