Ownership means feeling and accepting responsibility
Employees who show ownership don't just feel responsible, they also accept the responsibility. Not just for their own happiness at work, but for achieving the goals they set, and for the decisions they make. There are various different definitions of ownership, but most of them characterise ownership as:
- feeling and accepting responsibility;
- willing to answer for results;
- feeling connection / commitment;
- having self-reliance / a feeling of self-worth;
Anyone can display ownership, it does not matter what job-title a person has or what their position is within the organisation. A pre-condition for ownership is of course that a person is intrinsically motivated. Someone who displays ownership will do something because they want to, and not because they have to or because they are paid to do it. As well as this, the person must have enough trust in their own ability to deal with the task. Finally, it helps if a person can understand the purpose of what they are doing. These elements, and therefore ownership too, can often be found among employees with a high level of enthusiasm.
Ownership in relation to fitness for work
What is actually the relationship between ownership and fitness for work? First of all: an employee who is fit for work long-term, is competent, motivated and healthy. To reinforce these three elements, ownership (also called self-management or self-leadership) is actually vital. You as manager can do a lot to make your employees "future proof", but you will get the best results if the person sees it as their own responsibility to remain attractive to the organisation. Someone who wants to remain healthy and energetic, will adjust their lifestyle accordingly. The same thing applies to lifelong learning; that also works better when someone sees it as being important for them. In addition, various pieces of research have shown that employees who believe they can determine their own future and manage things for themselves are happier at work and experience less stress.
Managing things for themselves means that the employees are displaying self-leadership. According to Van Dorssen (2015) self-leadership means influencing yourself so that you are fully motivated, define your own path and perform the best you can (see also Neck & Houghton, 2006; Manz, 1986; Van Dorssen, Van Vuuren & Veld, 2015).
Encouraging employees to take ownership
You as manager can encourage ownership, by creating the right preconditions for it. The following ingredients will help:
- Autonomy: you give your employees the freedom and the influence to organise what needs to be done themselves;
- Trust: by genuinely leaving what needs to be done to your employees (and so not getting involved in it uninvited), you show that you trust them. This increases the trust they have in themselves;
- Self-knowledge: employees who know their own strengths and weaknesses can make better choices and are more aware of the effects of their actions.
- Transparency: nothing is more demotivating than starting to really putting your heart and soul into something and then to be called off it for unclear, incomprehensible or inexplicable reasons. Ownership goes hand-in-hand therefore with transparency, rational decision-making and relationships between equals.
Making ownership a reality
A manager who encourages ownership plays more of a coaching role than a managerial, controlling role. The skill is to equip your employees with the right tools to make independent decisions and to find their own path. They need to gain the confidence to be able to start doing so. The following tips will help to make ownership successful:
Tips
- Let go
Teach yourself to sit on your hands and not intervene too quickly. However tempting it may be to get involved. If you see, for example, that someone is not able to reach a decision (fast enough), still leave the employee to make the decision on their own. This is the only way to make someone really feel responsible and able to show their ownership. Otherwise it has once again become your project, your idea or your plan. - Offer clarity
To be able to really develop ownership properly, clear reference frameworks are needed. For an employee who makes a decision independently and is held responsible for it, it is important that he knows where exactly the boundary of their responsibility lies. Define goals using SMART and define the limits of the task clearly. This creates clarity, which means that employees feel safe and dare to make mistakes. - Celebrate successes
Always give feedback, including during the course of a project. Some goals can probably only be achieved over a rather long time frame. In these cases, it is really good to talk about what is going well in the meantime. If necessary, set up smaller goals as interim steps, so that people can see that progress is being made. This helps employees to remain motivated. By focussing attention explicitly on what is going well, you also increase the self-confidence of your employees and their trust in each other and in you. - Leave space for mistakes
To err is human, especially when people are doing something for the first time. Making mistakes is also an amazing learning tool, because no-one really wants to make the same blunder twice. Especially not if on the first occasion you met with understanding from your manager and confidence that you would do it right the next time. Never punish people hard for mistakes, but always ask what can be done to resolve them and prevent them happening next time. Say aloud that you trust that the person has learned from it. - Be honest
If it appears that someone is a square peg in a round hole, then be honest, talk about it and don't keep muddling through for ages. This may appear harsh, but you are giving someone else the chance to look around at what might well suit them better. This is doing your employee, your team and yourself a service in the long term.
Challenge
You can fan the flames of responsibility by actively involving your employees in the goals that you want to achieve. Sit down and talk to your employees and ask what they think is the best way to achieve a certain goal. For example:
- How can you make sure that you carry on doing your work in the way that suits you?
- What job would allow you to use your abilities to best effect?
- What activities do you enjoy doing most?
- Where do you see yourself in this organisation in five years time?
- What is stopping you from achieving your goal?
- Where can I, as your manager, best support you?
- What skills do you want to develop in the near future, and why?
Invite your employees in this way to think for themselves about the various ways in which something can best be achieved. Then you need to give your employees the opportunity to follow through independently on what they thought out for themselves. This means that you not only make people responsible for achieving a goal, but you also hand over the process to them. That is true ownership. People will feel more responsible for something that they thought of for themselves, feel is important to them and can carry out for themselves.
These articles might also be of interest:
Enthusiastic or addicted to work?
Every manager is happy with employees who work hard all day, always complete their work on time and are just itching to tackle new challenges. But even those employees who appear to be the most enthusiastic can be at risk of burnout. Instead of being enthusiastic, these employees are actually addicted to work. If you can learn to tell the difference, you can turn their work addiction round into work enjoyment.
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