I'll be honest with you: many of my newsletter ideas start in my personal life.

Not the cringe kind of “here’s buying groceries taught me about leadership”… but sometimes (actually, like twice a week), the most mundane situations help me recognize a pattern. Then, the next morning I'm sitting with a client - all the professional CEO advisor - and I see the same damn pattern playing out in their company.

That's what happened last week.

I spent several days home alone with my 1 and 4-year-old kids. No “co-leader”, no backup, no one to catch what I dropped. Read: My wife Jessie took a well-earned vacation with her friend to Ireland.

It was exhausting. And it cracked open something I've been trying to articulate for a long time about the nature of responsibility.

The first thing I noticed was how quickly I stopped trying to do anything extra. No optimizing, no multitasking, no sneaking a glance at my phone while pretending to watch them play. Limited capacity has a way of clarifying priorities instantly. When you know the whole thing rests on you, you stop attempting anything you can't actually carry. You do the basics. You do them well. And oddly, that feels like enough.

The second thing I noticed was how present I became. Not because I'm a particularly mindful person, but because there was no exit. No "I'll half-pay attention here because my partner will pick up the thread." No quiet hope that someone else would handle the difficult moment at the kitchen table. It was just me and two small humans who needed me fully. So I showed up fully. The quality of those 48 hours - genuinely - was higher than many weekends where we were both there but each half-somewhere-else.

The third thing I noticed was the absence of drag. Hungry? Pasta. Tired? We sleep now. Dispute over cups? Ruling is final. I'm not glorifying this - a benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. But there is something clarifying about a loop that goes directly from observation to decision to action, with nothing in between.

When my wife came home, I was genuinely relieved. I had missed her. The system is warmer, richer, and more sustainable when we are together. But I also noticed - immediately - how the weight redistributed. And with it, almost imperceptibly, how my attention did too.

That observation stuck with me.

Here is the belief I keep coming back to, both at home and with my clients:

Responsibility cannot be shared. Work can.

It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it is decidedly not: When two people share the work, the system becomes more productive. When they share the mental and emotional load, they feel less alone. And when they share responsibility - meaning both hold 100%, simultaneously - the system becomes more resilient. When one makes a mistake, the other catches it. When one falls ill (ten days of Influenza A, anyone?) or jets off to Ireland (well deserved!), the other is still there holding down the fort.

But here is what co-leadership cannot do: make you less than 100% responsible.

If you are truly co-leading, you are not each holding 50%. You are each holding 100% - because at any point, you need to be able to cover for your partner. Workload, mental load, and emotional load: all that can be shared. Ownership cannot.

The emotional experience of having a partner makes this easy to forget. You feel supported. You feel less alone. And that feeling - which is legitimate and good - quietly creates a dangerous assumption: that your partner will catch what you miss.

This assumption is where things start to fall apart.

It happens in small moments, and at unpredictable times - a standard quietly lowered, a task left slightly incomplete, an issue noticed but not quite followed through on. Nobody decides to let things slip. It just becomes possible to let things slip, because someone else might catch it. Over time, both people are doing this. The cracks don't announce themselves. They accumulate.

This is what it looks like when two people (business or life partners) have each quietly taken less than 100% - and assumed the other would cover the gap.

The relationship suffers next: Resentment doesn't need a dramatic incident. It just needs a long enough pattern of things falling through the cracks.

The instinct at this point is to course-correct back to 100%. To have a clarifying conversation, stage an intervention, and recommit.

But there is a more radical - and more effective - move: take one person temporarily to zero.

I don't mean this as a punishment, or a recovery retreat - it's a forcing function. When one co-leader is fully absent, the other can no longer assume anyone will catch what they drop. The gap closes - not because you negotiated it closed, but because it had to. Full ownership becomes the only option.

When my wife flew to Ireland, life (via Zoe and Theo) showed me, very quickly, what 100% responsibility actually feels like. No ambiguity.

The same logic applies at the company level. One of my CEOs is preparing to raise growth equity over the coming weeks. For the next few months, he will be largely consumed by investors and roadshows - not running the business day to day. Rather than treating this as a problem to manage, we are treating it as a developmental opportunity. His C-level team will need to run the business on their own. Fully, not "mostly" or "with check-ins."

His absence forces their ownership.

And when he returns, he steps back into a team that has genuinely levelled up - not because he trained them in a workshop, but because they had to hold the full weight themselves.

Stepping away, consciously and temporarily, is one of the most underused leadership moves I know.

(And yes - this is what my wife's vacation to Ireland taught me about leadership. I couldn't resist. Also, she brought presents back!)

This works on a napkin. You don't need a workshop.

Draw two columns.

Column A - Shared (but shouldn't be): List every area of your business where you and another leader are both "responsible." These are the domains where, if something fell through the cracks, neither of you would be clearly accountable. Some of these will be areas where you share the work - that's fine. But if you're also telling yourself you share the responsibility, you're lying to yourself. Name one owner. If you can't, that's your gap.

Column B - Truly owned: List every area where one person holds undivided ownership. No ambiguity about who answers for it.

Now look at Column A. For each item: who actually owns this? Name one person.

The goal isn't to cut your partner out. It is to make ownership explicit - so that "we're both responsible" never quietly becomes "neither of us is fully responsible."

One final question worth sitting with: Is there a domain in your business that would benefit from you stepping away for a defined period - not to abandon it, but to force genuine ownership into the people who need to grow into it?

That might be the most valuable thing you do this quarter.

Yours,