Above the Line

The Moment

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, four travelers set off for the Emerald City each convinced someone else holds what they lack: the Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, the Lion courage, Dorothy a way home. They spend the whole journey waiting on a wizard to fix them — only to learn the capacity was theirs all along. In 1994, three authors — Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman — built a leadership framework on that story and called it The Oz Principle. Three decades later it's still one of the best-selling books ever written on accountability.

Waiting on the wizard is what the book calls living "below the line" — its name for the zone of self-victimization. It rarely sounds like blame, excuses, or denial in the moment. It sounds reasonable: "It's not my job." "Nobody told me." "We'll wait and see." "That's just how it works around here." Below the line always feels like being level-headed about a situation that's out of your hands.

The Oz Principle defines accountability as "a personal choice to rise above one's circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results." Above the line, it runs on four moves: See It (face reality squarely), Own It (accept responsibility for the results, regardless of who caused the problem), Solve It (keep asking "what else can I do?"), and Do It (follow through). Notice the hinge in Own It: you own the result even when you didn't cause the problem. That isn't a statement about fairness. It's the definition of leadership.

Catch yourself the next time a below-the-line sentence starts to form — "not my job," "nobody told me," "we'll wait and see." Trade it for the one question that lives above the line: "What else can I do?" Ask it out loud, once today, about the thing you've been waiting on someone else to fix.