Getting your team to take Ownership
Ownership is not an intellectual state, it is a feeling. As such, you can talk about ownership and present the rational reasons why individuals on your team should take ownership until you are blue in the face and very little will happen. To understand some of the techniques that work to actually encourage your team to take ownership, hit the jump.
How does a leader change feelings? Not by saying, “hey, team, we should feel differently!” The part of the brain that feels things works by different rules than the part of the brain that thinks rationally. Both the thinking and feeling brain are closely intertwined but feeling drives thinking, not the other way around. For a very readable detailed examination of why and how this is so, see this book by Antonio Damasio. For right now, though, here are three things you can do to change feelings:
- Use metaphors and analogies – the easiest way to get someone to feel something is to get them thinking about something else that they already have strong feelings for and to “import” those feelings in some small way to the context of work. So, for example, if you want your team to feel responsibility for the outcome of your group’s performance on a certain project, work to get your team to think of itself as a family. Specifically, by increasing the extent to which they feel that their team (or organization) is like a family they “import” some small portion of the emotion they already have about their family – loyalty, willingness to sacrifice, identification with shared success. Once imported, this emotion motivates new behavior in the new context.
- Model and label the behaviors you want – You can’t talk someone into feeling a certain way, but you can model certain behaviors and those behaviors will help them come to the right emotional place. In coaching we sometimes say “the smile drives the happy” – that if we are successful in getting people to “do” the right things they will come to feel the right way as a consequences. Notice, this is different than just trying to persuade them that they should feel a certain way. Instead, we are showing them how to act in very specific ways and then letting that behavior backfill the emotion. A good friend of mine owns a wonderful restaurant told the following story:
“I had just hired a guy as a cook and I watched one day as he went about his tasks getting ready to open for the night. He was out in the dining area and he saw a gum wrapper on the ground, beneath one of the tables. He stopped, dropped to one knee, and picked it up, and then went about his business. He didn’t have to. His job was in the kitchen. But he knew that when a customer sat down to eat a meal, part of the experience would be the dining room and so he took ownership.”
For my friend, he told this story to the rest of the restaurant staff. He labeled the behavior and said, “there. That’s what ownership looks like!” This took something abstract and made it concrete, giving the other workers knowledge of at least one specific behavior that my friend was looking for and looking to reward.
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Make team members think carefully about their own ownership experiences – I don’t use the word “make” much. I prefer “persuade” or “influence.” Sometimes, though, you have to make people do things to get them to do it. At your next or a future staff meeting, communicate to the team that one topic you’ll be discussing is ownership. When the meeting arrives, have each person take out a sheet of paper and write down three things they take pride in owning. It can be their house, their car, their favorite pair of hiking boots (which is mine
). Then have them write down a paragraph about how they behave differently toward these things because of their ownership relationship. Finally, lead the group in a discussion of what they wrote down, reinforcing the good examples, and exploring the ones that might not be as compelling. The exercise should take about 30-40 minutes for an average sized staff meeting (6-10 people). The reason this works is because each of your people are being forced to dredge up the feelings of ownership they already have in their lives. They can then draw the connection to what that would feel like in the context of your team.
All of this is important because there is no more important concept in leadership than ownership. Great leaders help their people take ownership of their work, their group, and their organization. This makes the people and the leader more effective and more fulfilled – not a bad day’s work as a leader.
Reader Comments
I like this cause I feel take the ownership and keep team motivated is the most important factor for the team(project)’s success.
It would be helpful if you can give some in-sight on how to make job hopper(those stay in the team temporarily or looking for other opportunity) take the ownership. My experience is most good one will take ownership even if you didn’t do anything. Those job hopper are the toughest ones to get them take ownership seriously.
Another question I have is how to align team member’s interest with the project. If it is aligned well, it will be much easier to take the ownership.
Thanks Bob for the post.
I really found this post helpful as this is one of my biggest challenge at my work place. I have been a technical lead for quite some time but very recently my team strength has grown from a mere 5 to 15 and hence i am experiencing a wide variety of team dynamics.
I hope to use some of the directions pointed out above to grow the sense of ownership within the team. I agree that a happier and more cohesive team would result to better results and continued progress.
I would really like if you could post some more analogies and examples that may be I could refer to to achieve this goal.
I like this idea which actually divides my big ownership to small ownerships and let the team to conquer them. This can also let me focus more on urgent issues and new requirement, etc.
One downside is that you have to spend extra time to coach team members who are not up to speed or expectation to take ownership.
I like the suggestion. How would you handle the case of a cynical team member in the suggested scenario?
I love the story of the cook bending down to pickup a gum wrapper from the floor of the dinning area… that is so true in every industry for example this is applicable in any software product that is complex enough to have different units/modules of software code that are put together to create the completed software, during the ‘putting together’ process may gum wrappers are dropped and not always cleared up.
What I would like to know is about using examples to the team about one member taking ownership.
Is it a good idea to use examples about someone who takes ownership in the team? I am concerned if it could be seen as favoring one team member versus others.
Here’s a quote from a sci-fi book “In Conquest Born” (C.S. Friedman): “An uninspired ruler works to develop those relationships which will be most to his advantage. A great ruler determines the most desirable relationships and assumes them in to being.”
I see this as a way to institute a bit of friendly competition among the team. Telling the story to the rest of the staff basically communicates your expectations on how you see good or bad performance. This allows everybody to have the same reference or metric and enables them to chose whether they would want to apply it or not. It is up to them then to take ownership of this…
I see ownership as something that build bridges to enable something. Ownership is all about collaboration and positive energy. Grey areas are the biggest obstacle to ownership. This problem is not in my domain. Why do I care? If one has the ownership of the problem, things would get resolved quickly. Ownership can enable a company/individual to leap frog
I like the stress placed on defining what ownership means. It could mean different things to different people. Three easy steps identified are enough for someone to start thinking in that direction.
I can see this will have value as a team exercise. Use of metaphor should be particularly helpful with writers. I will surely need to exclude cats from the range of items owned, though.
I would like to know how can we enforce ownership in certain situations like – when the person is not totally engaged in the project, not sure about how his/her contribution is helping overall success of the project, just doing the things for paycheck or bonus. As you had mentioned since ownership is a feeling, it is hard to measure and reward, especially the system rewards based on data or the facts.
This is a very important topic. A while back I had a team that was unmotivated to work as a team. Once I figured that by giving them a sense of ownership of specific work, of initiatives, of mentoring others, it has completely changed the team dynamics. It has allowed me to delegate more work, has improved work productivity and efficiency from each member of my team. Great post!
This blog is more about taking ownership and I believe that is what you are intended.
I want to point out the other side of it, I am surprised to see over and over again how our leaders wait to ‘give ownership’ until they almost fail to see the results.
I believe ‘give’ and ‘take’ goes both hand in hand to reduce the ambiguity and to set accountability.
As I see it ownership is the one of the best ways for a manager to scale and help take their organization to the next level. One of the things that I have wrestled with is getting other groups to reciprocate, taking ownership of their space, or when a service/responsibility is turned over to as an operational responsibility. Sometimes the level of ownership doesn’t manifest. How can I help as a leader to help promote this ownership in organizations where I don’t have direct managerial influence?
I agree with you Rob. If you can have your team “own” their deliverables and beyond that have a sense of wnership for the success of the entire project / team, the work attitude improves and they will go out of their way to make “it” happen.