Building a culture of ownership takes a long time. Longer than most managers expect. You spend months creating the conditions — the outcome orientation, the closed feedback loops, the refinement sessions where engineers show up prepared and ask why before asking how. And then one day you look around and realize something has changed. The engineers who were hunting are starting to wait again.
This is what I am watching happen right now.
Not because the engineers changed. Because the environment changed around them.
What Happened
Last week our leader left the bank. She was one of the people pushing hardest for Lean Six Sigma as a replacement for the way our product teams work. Her departure did not resolve the uncertainty she created — it deepened it.
Part of the organization is now defining new ways of working but has not communicated them. The work our team was doing under her direction is in limbo. Nobody knows what the new direction is, who is making the decisions, or what the expectations are going to look like when the dust settles.
So everyone is waiting. And questioning. And wondering whether what they were doing still matters.
This is the moment I want to write about — not the governance creep or the methodology debate, but what happens to engineers when the ground shifts underneath them. What regression looks like. And what the manager’s job is when it starts.
What Regression Looks Like
The engineers who were hunting do not immediately become passive when the culture shifts. The regression is gradual and it starts with something subtle: they stop trusting that the environment will reward initiative.
They have been here before. Not necessarily at this organization — but in their careers, in previous environments, they learned what happens when they invest in something and then the organization changes direction. The feature they championed gets deprioritized. The process they improved gets replaced. The work they were proud of gets painted over by a broad brush that decided the whole approach was wrong even if their specific contribution was working.
That history lives in their bodies. And when the environment starts sending the same signals — uncertainty about direction, silence from leadership, the sense that decisions are being made somewhere above them without their input — the history activates. The learned helplessness that was dormant starts to stir.
The first sign is usually in refinement. The engineer who was asking questions starts going quiet. Not dramatically — they still participate, still contribute, but the energy is different. They are hedging. They are waiting to see what the new environment rewards before they invest fully again.
The Two Engineers I Am Watching
I have two engineers right now whose situations illustrate the two ends of this.
One has always carried a baseline anxiety about his job that surfaces whenever the environment is uncertain. The confusion we are in right now is feeding that anxiety in ways I can see clearly. He is not asking questions in refinement. He is waiting to be told what to do. The progress we made — getting him to show up prepared, to speak up, to trust that his judgment mattered — is at risk because the environment stopped sending the signals that made it safe to engage.
The other is a hunter. He has been the person our team relies on — the one with the answers, the one who surfaces problems nobody assigned him to find, the one who shows up to every meeting having already thought about the problem. His contract ends in a couple of months. The bank has decided not to extend most contractors.
He keeps doing his job. Every day. Fully present, fully engaged, still hunting. But the situation is what it is, and the team knows it. Watching the person who most embodies ownership culture get let go — not because of performance, not because of anything he did, but because of a broad organizational decision — teaches everyone around him something about what the environment actually values.
That lesson is being taught right now whether I want it to be or not.
The Broad Brush Problem
The thing that makes this particular moment so hard is that what we built was working.
There are teams in this organization for whom the product team approach was not producing results. The Agile ceremonies were not translating into delivery. The outcome orientation was not taking hold. Those teams had real problems.
But the response to those real problems has been to paint with a broad brush — to treat the approach itself as the failure rather than the implementation, to throw out what was working alongside what was not. The teams that were delivering get caught in the same sweep as the teams that were not.
This is how organizations lose the things worth keeping. Not through deliberate decisions to eliminate them. Through decisions made at a level where the nuance is not visible — where the teams that worked look the same on the org chart as the teams that did not, and the intervention that gets applied is the same for both.
My engineers know what we built. They know it was working. And they are watching it get questioned by people who are not in our refinement sessions, who have not seen the metrics move, who are making decisions based on a category rather than a result.
That is demoralizing in a specific and legitimate way. It is not weakness or passivity. It is a rational response to watching good work get dismissed.
What the Manager’s Job Is Right Now
When the culture starts to shift — when the uncertainty rises and the engineers start hedging and the environment stops sending the signals that made ownership feel safe — the manager’s job is to provide stability.
Not false reassurance. Not pretending the uncertainty is not real. Stability.
Stability means keeping the work as consistent as possible while everything around it shifts. The refinement sessions still happen. The sprint goals still get named. The outcomes still get measured. The team still shows up on Tuesday morning and does the thing that needs doing — not because the organization has provided clarity, but because this team has not stopped being this team.
Stability also means helping people navigate what they cannot control. The engineer who is anxious about his job needs honest conversations about his career — not in the context of the current chaos, but in the longer context of what he is building and where he is going. The hunter whose contract is ending needs acknowledgment that what he built here was real and that it will travel with him wherever he goes next.
These are not management techniques. They are the things you do for people who are scared and who trusted you with the work.
What Holds
Here is what I keep coming back to when I look at the situation honestly.
The culture we built did not disappear because a leader left or because a contract is ending or because the organization is in confusion. It is under pressure. It is at risk. But the engineers who became hunters did not become passive the moment the environment shifted. They are still showing up. Still doing the work. Still bringing what they learned to every sprint.
The engineer who was making progress is not back to zero. He is anxious and hedging, but he remembers what it felt like to show up prepared and have his preparation matter. That experience does not erase.
What I am trying to do right now is hold the conditions as steady as I can while the organization figures out what it wants to be. Keep running the refinement sessions the same way. Keep closing the feedback loop. Keep naming the outcomes. Keep showing that the work matters even when the organization is not sure what it values.
The culture is not a finished thing. It never was. It requires ongoing attention and it is especially fragile when the environment shifts.
But fragile is not the same as gone.
Hold the line. Keep the work moving. And trust that the engineers who learned to hunt have not forgotten how — even if they are waiting, right now, to see whether the new environment is going to be worth investing in.
Getting Engineers to Give a Damn: A Manager’s Guide to Building Ownership Inside Broken Systems is available now. Get it here →
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I publish every Tuesday at danielholt.substack.com
