What is ownership and why is it important?
Birds that own their skies - Rahul Dhaundiyal

What is ownership and why is it important?

When was the last time you heard a manager asking employees to ‘take’ more ownership? Unfortunately, what they really want to say is “please take on more responsibilities”.

Ownership is not a bigger bag of responsibilities. Ownership is like living in a house that you ‘own’ - the one you worked hard to build. If you see a crack in your house - your first instinct is to fill it as soon as possible, no matter how small the crack is. Whereas if you are living in a rented, temporary apartment, you tend to overlook faults. “Not my problem”. “Not worth the effort”.

Unfortunately, companies create rented spaces and then expect employees to behave like owners. Not cool.

Remember, you can ‘make’ someone an owner… you can ‘give’ someone ownership, but you can’t simply ‘ask’ someone to be an owner. You must fix the company culture if you have ownership issues. 

When employees have ownership, good things happen. The journey becomes just as important as delivering results. So if you are an engineer, you aren’t simply delivering features in your product. You want to write good code. You want to invest in better design. You don’t want to take shortcuts. Because it is ‘your’ product, and you take pride in what you have built.

So what can you do? As a manager, one easy way to fix many problems is to ensure that you aren’t simply delegating responsibilities. You must delegate authority too. A common employee complaint is that the management wants them to make changes without giving them the authority to make decisions.

And what NOT to do? I get really annoyed when leaders give their own examples to ‘inspire’ ownership. Maybe they do have a genuine sense of ownership. Or maybe they actually own the business. But mostly such acts lack empathy, and consequently, look patronising. Thanks, but no thanks!

This is a big topic, and I wish I had more time to talk about it. Will try to post my list of dos and don’ts in the comments. 

Laters.

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