During a high-stress systems issue, a comment was made to me that stuck. “It’s your baby.” I was being associated with a particular platform or system, and while I do not believe it was meant negatively, it landed in a moment when tension was high and answers were needed.
After things settled, I reflected on it with my wife. She said something simple but powerful. “Yeah, but you know what to try when a baby is crying.”
That reframed everything.
The situation itself ended up having nothing to do with the system I was being associated with. But the point was never about ownership. It was about responsibility. When you have experience in an area, when you understand common failure patterns, and when you know how systems typically behave under stress, you do not have to be the expert on the root cause to add value. Sometimes your role is knowing what to try first, what to validate, and how to help bring calm and clarity while the right subject matter experts engage.
In IT, it is easy to become siloed into specialties. Tickets get routed based on keywords. Escalations happen before scope is validated. Assumptions are made before basic questions are asked. It becomes comfortable to stay in our lanes and pass issues along rather than roll up our sleeves and help narrow the problem space.
Being an IT leader does not mean being the expert in everything. It does mean being willing to act as an extension of the experts. That can look like confirming whether an issue is widespread, testing basic functionality, gathering logs, opening support cases with meaningful data, or simply staying engaged and present during troubleshooting. If you have vendor support, internal engineers, or external partners available, then trying something is not overstepping. It is leadership.
Titles like engineer, administrator, director, CIO, and everything in between come with responsibility whether we ask for it or not. When we default to “it’s your baby,” we risk signaling that ownership matters more than outcomes. When we respond with curiosity, calm, and action, we create trust and momentum when systems are under pressure.
Sometimes leadership is not about fixing the problem. Sometimes it is about knowing what to try when the baby is crying.
How do you avoid siloed troubleshooting in your organization? How do you encourage validation before escalation? And how do you balance specialization with shared responsibility when things go sideways?