It was 2016. I was a Technical Lead at a fintech startup in Toronto, leading a team developing a next-gen pricing engine for some of the biggest banks in North America. The project was a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract—high stakes, high pressure.

If you’ve ever worked in finance, you know the chaos of month-end closings. The next day? Even worse—reconciliations. Every discrepancy had to be corrected before the bank’s operations resumed. Our team would spend late nights combing through massive Excel sheets, manually generating hundreds of complex SQL scripts to fix calculation errors.

There had to be a better way.

With an entrepreneurial mindset, I saw an opportunity: automate the entire process. We built a tool that could ingest Excel sheets, identify discrepancies, and generate SQL scripts—eliminating tedious manual work.

When the next month-end arrived, we put our automation to the test. A task that once took hours was now completed in minutes. Success!

Or so we thought.

The next morning, I walked into the office and was immediately pulled into a conference call with bank executives. Something had gone wrong. The reconciliations were incorrect.

My heart pounded. Was this the day I was getting fired?

Instead of panicking, I took a deep breath and leaned into extreme ownership. I explained the automation we had built, acknowledged the failure, and took full responsibility. I assured them we’d find the root cause and improve our testing to prevent future issues.

Then, I got to work with my team. We identified the gap, fixed the bug, and strengthened our test suite. The automation went on to save hundreds of hours and significantly improved the customer experience.

A few months later, instead of being fired, I was invited to Mexico with company executives to kick off a new multi-million-dollar contract.

Key takeaway:

As a leader, one of the most important skills you can develop is extreme ownership. Mistakes will happen. But if you can clearly explain your decisions and demonstrate a commitment to learning and improving, true leaders will support you.

Recommended Read: Extreme Ownership

This experience taught me a lesson that aligns perfectly with the principles in Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. The book, written by two former Navy SEALs, emphasizes that great leaders take full responsibility for their actions and decisions—both successes and failures.

If you want to level up your leadership skills and learn how to handle high-pressure situations with confidence, I highly recommend giving it a read.

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin