Beyond Ownership: Leadership Insights from Geeta Chapter 2, Verse 2.19 for Project Managers

Introduction

In Chapter 2, Verse 2.19 of the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna addresses Arjuna’s confusion about action and its consequences. Krishna explains that those who believe themselves to be the sole doers of their actions misunderstand the true nature of existence and outcomes. The verse reads:

“? ??? ?????? ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? ??? ?? ? ???????? ???? ????? ? ????????"

(Ya ena? vetti hantāra? ya?h chaina? manyate hatam, Ubhau tau na vijānīto nāya? hanti na hanyate.)

Translation: "He who thinks that the soul kills and he who thinks that the soul is killed are both ignorant. The soul kills not, nor is it killed."

For project managers, this teaching holds a powerful lesson: Don’t fall into the trap of extreme ownership to the point of burnout or blame. While leaders must act with responsibility, outcomes are often influenced by multiple factors, including teamwork, circumstances, and systems. This understanding frees project managers to act decisively, foster collaboration, and focus on the process rather than obsessing over outcomes.

This blog explores how Krishna’s wisdom applies to project management through a lighthearted story of a GenAI project where I learned to lead with perspective and humility.

Scenario: When the API Broke (and I Thought I Broke Everything)

It was a Friday evening—a time usually reserved for winding down with a chai in hand and plans for the weekend. But not this time.

“Tushar, the API just broke again,” Priya, our backend engineer, shouted from across the room.

I spun my chair to face her desk, where a sea of red error logs glared angrily from her monitor. It looked like the machine had decided to join the rebellion against us. The culprit? An integration failure between our GenAI anomaly detection model and the client’s database.

Rajiv, the QA lead, chimed in from behind his laptop. “Do we tell the client the API has gone rogue, or do we blame AWS?” His humor wasn’t helping my blood pressure.

We were deploying a powerful GenAI system—one that could revolutionize real-time analytics for the client—but things weren’t going according to plan. For weeks, we’d hit roadblocks: mismatched configurations, slow response times, and now this broken API.

For a moment, it felt personal. As the project manager, I’d taken ownership of everything—deadlines, deliverables, and every hiccup. I felt like the weight of the project sat squarely on my shoulders. If we failed, it would be my failure.

Priya noticed my silence. “Tushar, you okay?”

Krishna’s words echoed in my mind: The soul neither kills nor is killed. I realized I was mistaking myself as the sole doer—as if every problem rested only on me. But projects, like life, are collective endeavors. The solution lay in the team’s shared effort, not in my solitary stress.

Key Challenge

The primary challenge was an API integration issue that caused intermittent failures in the GenAI pipeline. My inability to delegate effectively and my misplaced sense of ownership amplified the pressure, impacting both the team’s morale and the project timeline.

The Turning Point

“Alright, team,” I said, standing up and walking to the whiteboard. “This isn’t my problem to fix—this is our problem. Let’s break this down.”

I listed the tasks:

1. Priya would debug the API requests and isolate the failing endpoints.
2. Rajiv would run parallel QA tests with mock datasets to validate performance.
3. Karan, our DevOps lead, would tweak the server configurations to rule out latency issues.

As we divided the tasks, the atmosphere shifted. Priya smirked. “So we’re sharing the blame now? I can live with that.” Rajiv laughed. “If we’re going down, we’re going down together.”

Over the next 24 hours, the team identified the issue—a mismatched schema in the API integration—and fixed it. By Monday morning, the pipeline was back online. The client never knew how close we came to disaster, and the team learned how to tackle challenges together.

Personal Reflection

This experience taught me a valuable lesson: project managers aren’t lone warriors. While ownership is critical, true leadership lies in empowering the team to share both challenges and solutions. By letting go of extreme attachment to outcomes, I freed myself to act decisively and focus on the process.

Main Argument

Krishna’s teaching in Verse 2.19 reminds project managers that they are facilitators, not omnipotent doers. Outcomes are the result of collective effort and circumstances. By fostering collaboration and perspective, leaders can tackle challenges without losing their composure.

Actionable Framework for Project Managers

1. Empower the Team: Delegate tasks and trust the team to solve challenges collectively.
2. Detach from Blame: Understand that setbacks are part of the process, not personal failures.
3. Focus on the Process: Prioritize action and problem-solving over obsessing about outcomes.
4. Communicate Clearly: Reiterate the collective nature of success and challenges to the team.
5. Reflect and Adapt: Learn from every challenge and improve processes for future projects.

In a past project involving cloud migration, unexpected server downtimes caused panic. By splitting tasks across the team—debugging, documenting, and testing—we resolved the issue efficiently while maintaining stakeholder trust.        

As Krishna teaches, leaders must act without ego or attachment, recognizing that success is a shared outcome. For project managers, this perspective fosters resilience, collaboration, and clarity.

“Leadership is not about carrying the weight alone but about guiding the team to lift together.”