Own
“Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors.”
~ Mike Abrashoff
Okay, it’s tough out there. There are a lot of issues to contend with: increasing uncertainty about the economy, the changing vagaries of the workforce, and the incredible rise in prices, just to name a few. We’ve written ad nauseam about the challenges and costs of low engagement, but if you aren’t immediately familiar with that issue as you read it, you should check it out. When you do, you better be sitting down.
There is a rising frustration I am finding with business owners and senior leaders. They are really bothered by how their senior team members don’t seem to be acting with a sense of ownership. To treat the work and the organization as if they own it. I almost respond with the same question every time I hear it.
“Why should they?”
They have jobs and we are paying them. They have tasks to complete and we have agreed to pay them a certain sum for that work. If we can be in agreement about that, we are comparably in pretty good shape to many employment situations. If owners are getting the tasks done they have paid for and the person doing them feels reasonably compensated for the work, that is a huge win.
But operating with a sense of ownership is far more rare. And there are people who organically just seem to operate with a greater natural sense of ownership, but for pretty much everybody else, we’re going to have to cultivate that sense of ownership. We’ve learned there are three pretty simple ways to achieve that result. Simple, but not easy.
Not easy in the sense that the things we must do come with a cost and fly in the face of what most owners of businesses were likely taught. If we want to keep from being a “genius with a thousand helpers” as Jim Collins described, we need to make some changes.
Three Ways to Cultivate Ownership on Your Teams:
Give them equity in the company.
Allow them to profit share participate in company success.
Give them a bigger voice in important decisions in the company.
The benefits are real and compelling. I have first hand experience with all of them:
An owner told me recently how giving key stakeholders ownership has raised his remaining equity to much greater value than the 100% he used to own.
I’ve seen individuals and whole teams flip their attitudes like a switch on both income and expense when they had real skin in the game.
When we treat their opinions and contributions like they matter, they treat the company’s overall success more like it matters to them.
It will cost you to groom a greater sense of ownership, but I promise you will win from an ROI standpoint beyond what you believed was possible.
Consider
Does your key leadership operate with a sense of ownership?
Have you ever stopped to think why? Asked yourself how your actions might be contributing?
Which of the three methods articulated above do you feel like you need to implement? (We’ve got a lot of experience in this space…let us know if we can help)
