Jim Rohn, a leading expert in the domain of personal mastery, said, “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you,” yet you see gym-goers putting complete responsibility of their well being on the gym-trainer. They want instant miracles to happen when they hire a personal coach. What they forget is that the coach can only act as a facilitator and you are the one who has to do the pushups and crunches and lift weights every day. The coach can give you a diet plan, but you must follow it to see results. Many people join the gym but very few continue going. They don’t see the results and hence they give up. It is not the gym or the coach or the diet plan that makes people get results, but it is their own personal effort that makes all the difference. This is called ownership – when you take complete responsibility for the results you get.
In part 1, I covered how organizations bleed when they fail to foster a culture of ownership. In this article I will discuss 3 powerful ways to foster ownership and improve the quality of results that you get as a team.
Have you ever felt like someone you knew would prefer you to act differently than you currently do? It’s human nature that, with or without meaning to, we all try to change those around us. Everyone does it! At work, managers try to change their workers; at home, parents try to change their children; and in social circles, people try to change friends and acquaintances. Everyone is trying to change someone. We are so busy changing people around us that we have lost our own focus. Many of us have spent years trying to change someone, to no end. Some have tried everything possible to change people’s thinking and behavior so that they become more like us, yet they have failed. It is just like pushing a wall and expecting it to move.
“Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most powerful thing you can do to drive success.” – Gary W. Keller
One of the most recurring complaints in organisations is a lack of accountability on the part of employees. For example, being late for meetings, and justifying their behaviour with excuses like ‘the traffic was terrible’ or ‘my car broke down.’
A true culture of ownership comes when employees feel that they have an equal role in the company’s overall success. This creates an environment where your team is guided more by values than rules. Furthermore, this helps establish a clear connection between their actions and the company’s cumulative success.
A sense of ownership enables better decisions on your team’s part. They feel motivated to take better care of the clients, be creative, and encourages involvement in the overall success of the organisation. Feeling like they are part of a bigger picture can encourage job satisfaction.
As leaders, the easiest way to establish a sense of ownership is to avoid the blame game. Instead, encourage your team members to adapt an ownership mindset. Let’s look at three impactful ways to enable the same –
Stating the Obvious: Build Accountability
As a leader, you need to ensure that each team member has a clear sense of responsibility. Building an effective team does not mean that you need to micro manage everything. Instead, it means that employees feel responsible for their actions, with absolute ownership. All in all, creating an atmosphere of accountability is one of the best ways to harbor a mentality of ownership at the workplace.
Mistakes happen – allow them!
‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’
Leaders should create room for improvement with timely feed-forward on each team member’s performance. However, it is essential for companies to enable a safe space for teams to make, and own up their mistakes. This doesn’t mean that the mistakes go unnoticed. But, rather, mistakes made are looked upon as instances to learn from.
As a leader, be compassionate about the inevitable mistakes so that your team is not hesitant to learn, experiment, and innovate with new concepts and ideas.
Define the end goals
When it comes to nurturing a culture of ownership, it is important to establish realistic and clear goals for the entire team. This further enables accountability. Also, as a leader, you being clear on the expectations from each team member will establish trust. This, in turn, will push your team to be committed to a collective singular vision. Trust is a fundamental part of ownership and the members who are given responsibility, take responsibility.
As a leader, if you do your best to help your team learn and grow, youwill be surprised by what they can accomplish. A higher sense of ownership infused in the workforce not only results in unprecedented success, but also ensures a happy and satisfied workforce.
We recently conducted a workshop for one of our existing clients. The brief given to us was that whenever team members encountered a problem or an obstacle, instead of looking at ways to overcome them or deal with problems, they often indulged in a blame game, finger pointing, attitude of helplessness, and consciously or unconsciously avoided accountability for individual or collective results. It instantly reminded us of this video, which shows the same behavior:
Jim Rohn, a leading expert in the domain of personal mastery, said, “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you,” yet you see gym-goers putting complete responsibility of their well being on the gym-trainer. They want instant miracles to happen when they hire a personal coach. What they forget is that the coach can only act as a facilitator and you are the one who has to do the pushups and crunches and lift weights every day. The coach can give you a diet plan, but you must follow it to see results. Many people join the gym but very few continue going. They don’t see the results and hence they give up. It is not the gym or the coach or the diet plan that makes people get results, but it is their own personal effort that makes all the difference. This is called ownership – when you take complete responsibility for the results you get.
