CEOs: "Why Are People Not Taking Ownership?"
Too Many Meetings = Too Little Ownership.
On the one hand, I often hear CEOs lament: “Why are people not taking ownership and driving results?”
On the other hand, I frequently hear Product Managers complain: “Why don’t they just let me do my job? I know what we should do, but it’s impossible in this organization.”
Why this happens is actually pretty simple:
The higher the trust in an organization, the more decisions you can make.
The more decisions you can make, the more ownership you can have.
You can’t have ownership without the ability to make decisions. It’s that simple.
In many organizations, there isn’t enough trust. When there is no trust and psychological safety, the following happens:
If you can’t make decisions, you will restructure the organization around the inability to decide. Think silos, departments, processes, rules and lots of meetings. Departments will actively try to maximize their decision-making power over little pumpkin patches of responsibility and begin to fight each other.
If you can’t make decisions, you will struggle to deliver results, and trust will plummet.
When trust plummets, you will get even more bureaucracy, rules and processes to compensate for the lack of trust. Basically it will amplify point 1.
As a result, it becomes even more difficult to make decisions, take ownership and deliver on results.
Congratulations, you’ve now entered the Cycle of Distrust:
When you don’t trust your people, you will develop an organization where you can’t trust your people. Distrust fuels distrust.
Leaders: if you feel like teams are not taking enough ownership, it’s most likely not the fault of your teams, but a symptom of a dysfunctional organization.
You can’t have ownership with little pumpkin patches of responsibility that actively cannibalize each other.
If you can’t trust your people, then that’s the problem you must fix.
Anything else is insanity.
That is very accurately described. Thanks for making it so clear.