Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, Mindshift Advisors
How ownership gets lost in the struggle to achieve.
One day this week, my son was playing with friends under the supervision of a babysitter. She didn’t have a lot to do while he was playing so I asked her to grab the grocery delivery from the front porch so I could stay on my work call.
She brought in most of the bags and set them on the counter. Then, sent me a text to ask if I wanted her to put them away.
I want to pause here because…it’s a strange question, right? I mean, milk and ice cream bars, and ground turkey were in those bags. Like, what are the options for what comes next?
I didn’t see the text for ten minutes (on account of the working).
She waited.
While my frozen and refrigerated groceries melted on the counter, she sat and waited for further instruction about what to do.
That’s what it looks like when someone lacks the very skill I want to discuss. And, in today’s workplace – it’s more common than you’d think.
What this skill really is
Psychologists have names for parts of this—initiative, proactive behavior, organizational citizenship. What we’re really talking about is a higher‑order function that combines two critical skills:
- Awareness: noticing what needs to be done without being prompted.
- Agency: taking responsibility to do it—or at least to move it forward—without waiting for permission or direction from somebody else.
For the purpose of this conversation, let’s just call the skill groceries.
Because it’s the difference between:
- Grabbing the groceries, putting the cold items in the fridge and freezer, and then asking, “Anything else you’d like me to do?”
- Grabbing the groceries, setting them down, and waiting for directions while the ice cream liquefies.
People without groceries tend to attach themselves to the people who do. In business settings, this reality becomes especially brutal.
Your high performers notice and act with ease. They see the gaps, they anticipate the next step, they quietly do the work that keeps the whole system moving.
Your low performers are disconnected, waiting to be told what to do next—even when the “next obvious step” is right in front of their face.
Left unchecked, this pattern creates a perfect storm:
- Burnout among your highest performers.
- Operations that grind to a halt.
- An invisible managerial tax for the people leaders who are constantly “thinking” for everyone else.
When a team or organization priorities this skill, things get done faster. Problems are caught earlier. The day‑to‑day feels less gated because no one is waiting around for permission to take the next reasonable, responsible step.
The “half‑done work” test
You’re probably already thinking of a few people on your team who have groceries down pat. (And, probably a few who don’t.) One sure fire way to know, is to look at who you trust.
There’s the person who, when you hand something off to them, allows you to stop thinking about it entirely. You know it will get done, and done well. They assume accountability for both the task and the outcome.
Then there’s the person who turns every assignment into a co‑working exercise for which you didn’t sign up.
Years ago, I rolled out a new Quarterly Business Review template for my team.
I asked each team member to build a client deck and walk me through it before using it. My goal was to ensure consistency of presentation and identify any inobvious gaps with what we’d made.
Very quickly, two groups emerged:
- Group 1 showed up with their template barely filled out, expecting to “work through the details together.”
- Group 2 arrived with decks essentially ready to go, expecting any tweaks to be additive, not foundational.
Group 2:
- Took responsibility for completing the task and making it excellent.
- They gave me new ideas that I could iterate into the template design for others.
- And, they reduced my cognitive load. They did their job, so I could do mine – review, refine, and learn.
Group 1:
- Placed the burden of work squarely at my feet.
- They needed me to think through even basic steps in order for them to be seen.
- And, treated my time as their default problem‑solving resource, instead of creating value themselves.
The difference wasn’t in the raw talent. It was in the assumption.
The people with groceries assumed responsibility not just for checking the box, but for owning the outcome.
Radical responsibility
People who do this well tend to hold one core belief: radical responsibility.
They don’t view only the narrow task in front of them as their responsibility. They view the outcome of those tasks—and the surrounding process—as theirs to care about, too.
So they notice opportunities to collaborate or improve process. They invest in those improvements, even if they weren’t “assigned” to them. And, they take responsibility for seeing things through.
When a team doesn’t have a lot of groceries, a few things can be going on behind the scenes.
- Lack of empowerment: When people genuinely don’t believe they’re allowed to act without explicit instruction, we’ve failed them before they start.
- Lack of clarity: Unclear accountabilities or having too many of them to count makes people freeze.
- Fit and risk misalignment: some people simply don’t see what needs to be done, or their intolerance for taking risk (“What if I do it wrong?”) keeps them from stepping in.
Your job as a leader is to diagnose which it is.
How leaders accidentally shut this down
Groceries is a usually a mix of innate tendency and environment. One of the quickest ways to kill it is to manage to your preferences instead of to outcomes.
Most of us have strong preferences for how we want things done: fonts, bullet styles, order of slides, email tone, meeting formats. When we make managing to our preferences everyone else’s job, they drop their groceries in favor of pleasing us.
Back when I was a sales rep, I asked my COO to join me for an important pitch. He brought me into his office to work on the deck and spent a full twenty five minutes asking me to change font sizes and bullet structures to match his preferred aesthetic.
After all the edits were complete, we had almost no time to spend on the actual content I was presenting and what I needed him to do when the meeting actually took place.
The result? He misrepresented information that was clearly written on the slide and created confusion instead of the clarity I needed him to bring.
I never invited him to a sales meeting again.
His “feedback” did not improve outcomes. It consumed my time, constrained my autonomy, and prioritized presentation over our goals.
As leaders, we do this in small ways all the time, without realizing it:
- Correcting style choices instead of sharpening thinking.
- Over‑directing the “how” even when the “what” is already correct.
- Punishing initiative when it doesn’t match our personal style.
Over time, people notice and stop owning things. They wait to be told, because your preference based corrections create a lot of unnecessary work.
What great leaders do instead
If you feel like you’re consistently working harder than your team, you likely have a groceries problem on your hands. To help them build their groceries skills, start by doing three things:
- Get ruthlessly clear on your preferences vs. your value.
- What do I expect just because that’s “how I like it”?
- What actually creates better outcomes for clients, employees, or the business?
- Where are your preferences coming at the expense of someone else’s ownership?
- Audit processes for clarity.
- Do our SOP’s make it clear who is responsible for what?
- For any given task, could someone reasonably infer the next step without being asked?
- Are your expectations for execution and quality explicit, or are they trapped in your head?
- Make sure your culture encourages ownership and speaking up.
- Do people feel comfortable calling you out on your contributions to their delays?
- Is there a fear of failure getting in the way of taking the next right step?
- What is the mechanism for calling out and coaching up groceries within your team?
No leader has time for half‑done tasks, unnecessary burdens, and unspoken problems undermining their success. But, if you want something better, you’re going to have to design it yourself.
You’ve got groceries, too, ya know. There’s no sense in leaving them on the counter to melt.
Mindshift Advisors helps high growth companies build leadership systems that unleash business results. If you’re noticing the groceries are rotting on your team, we’d love to help you diagnose what’s really going on and design something better.
Reach out to explore how Mindshift Advisors can support you and your team on that journey.
