Nobody Decided That. It Just... Happened.

How the passive voice became the favorite hiding place of weak leadership and what to listen for instead.

Five minutes into a conversation, I already know how accountable a leader is.

I don't need their title. I don't need their LinkedIn headline with eleven keywords in it. I just need to listen to their grammar.

Specifically: how they talk about decisions.

“We decided to pivot the roadmap” and “It got decided that we’d pivot the roadmap” are not the same sentence. One has a person in it.

That second sentence is a small masterpiece of self-protection. Nobody made that call. It simply got decided. By the universe, apparently. Democratically. With no fingerprints.

This is a pattern I've watched play out across every level of leadership, in every industry I've worked in. And once you learn to hear it, you can't stop hearing it.

The Sentence That Gives It Away

Language is data. Most of us treat it as decoration, the thing that wraps around the real information, but the structure of a sentence often carries more truth than its content.

Here's what I mean. I hear variations of this constantly:

• “Leadership landed on this direction.” — Leadership being a ghost, presumably.

• “The team felt it was the right move.” — Did they? All of them? At once?

• “It just kind of evolved that way.” — Decisions don't evolve. People make them.

Each one of these does the same job. It describes an outcome while quietly erasing the person responsible for it. And the function is always the same: if this works, I'll take the credit. If it doesn't, I was never really in the room.

That's not a grammar quirk. It's a strategy. A very deliberate one, even when the person using it doesn't consciously realize they're doing it.

Passive voice isn't an accident. It's an exit already built into the sentence, in case things go wrong.

Why This Habit Forms in the First Place

It's worth pausing on why so many leaders default to this language, because it's rarely conscious dishonesty. It's something closer to self-preservation that calcified into habit.

Decisions carry risk and risk feels safer when it's shared

Owning a decision means owning what happens next. If it goes well, fine. If it doesn't, you're the name attached to the outcome. Passive language quietly distributes that risk across an invisible “we” or an even more invisible “it.”

Org culture often punishes visible ownership

In environments where mistakes get punished publicly rather than discussed productively, leaders learn fast that vague language is protective. If no one can pin the decision on you, no one can blame you for it later.

It's learned by watching the leaders above you

Most leaders didn't invent this pattern. They inherited it. If the people who promoted you spoke this way for twenty years, the pattern feels normal, even correct, long before anyone questions it.

None of this excuses the habit. But understanding where it comes from makes it easier to actually break.

What This Costs a Team

This isn't just a communication style issue. It has real, measurable consequences for how a team operates.

Decisions get revisited endlessly

If no one owns a decision, no one feels obligated to defend it. So when pressure shows up — a stakeholder pushes back, a deadline tightens — the decision gets relitigated instead of executed. Teams lose weeks this way.

Accountability becomes a hot potato

When something goes wrong, the search for “who decided this” becomes its own miniature investigation. Energy that should go toward fixing the problem goes toward figuring out whose problem it actually is.

Trust erodes quietly

People are perceptive. A team will notice, even if no one says it out loud, that their leader never quite shows up in their own sentences. Over time, that erodes confidence, not because the leader is incompetent, but because they feel unaccountable, which is its own kind of unreliability.

Teams with serious momentum problems almost always have an ownership gap underneath and you can usually hear it before you ever see the org chart.

The Tell That Matters More Than the Words

Here's the deeper signal, though, not the vocabulary itself, but the reflex underneath it.

When something goes sideways, watch what the leader does next.

Do they get genuinely curious about why it happened? Do they ask real questions, look for the actual cause, treat the failure as information?

Or do they narrate the disaster like a news anchor reading someone else's headline, describing what happened with a strange, comfortable distance, as if they personally had nothing to do with it?

That reflex is the real test. Vocabulary can be coached. The reflex reveals what's actually happening underneath.

What Real Ownership Sounds Like

Compare all of that to the rare leader who says:

“I made that call. Here's my reasoning. Here's what I got wrong.”

That sentence should be unremarkable. It isn't. It's almost shocking how rare it is — which says everything about the bar most leadership conversations are actually clearing.

Notice what that sentence does that the passive versions don't:

• It names a person.

• It states a reason, which means it can be examined, debated, improved.

• It leaves room for being wrong, without treating wrongness as catastrophe.

That last part matters more than people realize. Leaders who can say “this is what I got wrong” without flinching aren't displaying weakness. They're displaying exactly the kind of stability that makes a team trust them with the next hard call.

How to Build the Habit In Yourself or Your Team

Listen to your own sentences for a week

Before changing anything, just notice. How often do you say “we decided” versus “it got decided”? Most people are genuinely surprised once they start paying attention.

Practice naming the decision-maker out loud, even when it's you

In meetings, in retros, in written updates — say “I decided” or “[Name] made that call” instead of letting decisions float anonymously. It feels exposed at first. That feeling fades, and what's left is a team that trusts you more, not less.

Make hindsight conversations safe before you need them

If your team only hears about decisions when something goes wrong, ownership will always feel like a liability. Talk about decisions — good and bad outcomes alike — as a normal part of how the team operates. That's what makes “I made that call” feel safe to say.

Reward the leaders who own the miss, not just the win

If the only people who get visibility are the ones with good outcomes to report, you're quietly training everyone to hide behind passive language when things go wrong. Make ownership of a bad outcome at least as respected as ownership of a good one.

The Real Question

This isn't really about grammar. It's about whether the people leading your organization are willing to be located, to exist inside their own decisions instead of narrating them from a safe distance.

So the question worth asking yourself, honestly, is this…

Do you decide things? Or do things just happen to get decided, somewhere near you, while you're standing close enough to take credit?

If you're not sure, listen to your own sentences this week. The answer is probably already there.