Own the UH-OH Before It Owns You

.............................................................................................................................When the sky falls, what is your immediate reflex?

Tuesday on the UH-OH Conversations with Cohesive Leaders podcast, Troy Hall, PhD I-CUDEand I spoke with Jason Peach, CCE, President and CEO of West Community Credit Union. Jason is a brilliant, highly successful leader, but he walked us through an UH-OH moment that nearly every leader faces at some point: the temptation to deflect.

A few years ago, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates by over 500 basis points in a single year. It was a historic, unprecedented macro-economic event that dried up liquidity across the entire banking system. Naturally, it put intense financial pressure on Jason’s organization.

When his board started asking tough questions, Jason’s initial instinct was to point outward.

"Look, this is a 50-year historic event. Nobody could have predicted this! The models don’t even test for this!"

And you know what? He was completely right. He didn't cause hyperinflation. He didn't force the Fed’s hand.

But as Jason quickly learned, being right doesn't mean you're leading.

The Deflection Reflex

When a massive external crisis hits, whether it’s a sudden market crash, a global pandemic, or a client pulling a major contract out of nowhere, the natural human reaction is to build a wall of excuses. We use external factors as armor to protect our egos and our jobs.

But in the boardroom and among your team, that armor looks like deflection.

Jason shared with us that trying to comfort the board by explaining why the situation wasn't his fault did the opposite of what he hoped. It didn't give them warm and fuzzy feelings. It made them nervous.

When you spend all your time telling people why you aren't in the center of the issue, you unconsciously convince them that you aren't equipped to fix it either.

Every time you deflect, you burn precious social capital. You signal to your team that your primary objective is self-preservation.

Radical Ownership Changes the Weather

Everything shifted for Jason when he stopped giving history lessons on the Federal Reserve and stepped into a concept we talk about constantly in elite leadership circles: extreme, radical ownership.

While leaders use different terms for it, the factual framework of Extreme Ownership was popularized by retired U.S. Navy SEAL commanders Jocko Willink and Leif Babin in their 2015 bestselling book born out of the brutal combat in Iraq. By definition, it means a leader must own everything in their world. There is absolutely no one else to blame. If a team or a strategy fails, the leader cannot point to external market shifts, poor supporting units, or bad luck. They must acknowledge the failure, take total responsibility for the outcome, and develop a plan to win.

Regular readers of this newsletter know I’m a huge believer in this framework. In fact, I previously broke down why Great Leaders Own Their Mistakes and why stopping the blame game is the foundation of building a high-performing team.

Jason lived that definition. He looked his board and his senior team in the eye and said:

We didn't cause the interest rate environment. But we did choose to run with a lower capital buffer because we wanted to drive value back to our members. That was our playbook, it left us exposed, and I am accountable for navigating us out of it.

The moment he owned the center of the issue, the entire dynamic changed. He stopped playing defense and started playing offense. He pulled his CFO and senior leadership together, front-loaded a high-priority three-year strategic plan, and over-communicated the unfiltered financial metrics to every single person in the organization from the board members right down to the front-line branch tellers.

By taking total accountability, his social capital multiplied. The board trusted him more because they saw a leader who could handle the unknown.

How to Reset If You’re Trapped in the Deflection Reflex

If you realize you’ve been building a wall of excuses around your own current UH-OH moment, you can still pivot. Here is how to course-correct, drop the defensive armor, and regain your team's trust immediately:

• Audit Your Vocabulary: Listen to how you talk about the crisis to your team or stakeholders. If your sentences frequently start with "Because of the market," "If the client hadn't," or "Due to external factors," catch yourself. Intentionally shift your language to focus strictly on what you and your team control.
• Call a Reset Meeting: Step into the room with radical transparency. You don't need a polished 10-step plan yet. You just need humility. Look your team or board in the eye and say, "I've been focusing too much on why this happened outside of our walls. That stops today. Here is the part we played in letting this affect us, and I take full accountability for navigating us forward."
• Isolate Your Highest-Priority Metric: When things go sideways, leaders tend to panic and chase ten different fixes at once, which stresses the team out even more. Follow Jason’s playbook: strip away the frivolous noise and get hyper-focused. Identify one or two critical metrics that will move the needle over the next 12 to 36 months, and align every meeting around them.
• Over-Communicate the Truth Down the Entire Pyramid: Do not gatekeep the bad news under the guise of protecting your staff. When leaders stay quiet, employees fill the silence with their worst fears. Educate your people on the reality of the situation and exactly how their day-to-day work directly impacts the recovery plan.

Navigate the Storm

When an Uh-Oh moment strikes your business, your team and your stakeholders do not need a lecture on why the weather is bad. They can see the rain. What they need to see is that their leader is accountable for navigating the ship through the storm.

At On Purpose Adventures and Cohesion Culture™, we consistently talk about building collaborative, high-performing teams. But a cohesive culture cannot survive a defensive leader.

If you are facing a crisis right now, drop the external excuses. Even if the crisis was triggered by something 100% outside of your control, the solution is entirely your responsibility. Own it completely, bring your people into the process, and watch your team's trust skyrocket.

What's an external challenge you're facing right now where you need to trade your armor for radical ownership?