Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO
Every day, I hear founders and executives say things like, “My team needs to be more accountable” or “I need this team to take more initiative”. They’re not looking for their teams to produce more status updates or dashboards.
They mean:
- “I need people to get better results.”
- “I need them to stop waiting for me to tell them what to do.”
- “I need to stop being pulled into every detail.”
- “I need to trust that important work will move forward without me chasing it.”
In other words, they are looking for competence and independence.
Most organizations don’t have people unwilling to work hard. What’s creating the disconnect is an ownership problem.
They’ve failed to clearly define what it means to own an outcome, stopped short of building the systems that make work visible and high quality, and spent too little time examining the leadership behaviors that are required to pull it off.
But, even when we’ve gotten everything about ownership wrong – it’s a pretty straightforward problem to fix. We start with a proper definition.
Ownership is more than responsibility
Ownership does not mean that someone completed the task assigned to them.
It means they are the clear point of responsibility for an outcome. They know what they are trying to accomplish, why it matters, who needs to be consulted or informed, and what decisions they have the authority to make.
When a person actually owns an outcome they can complete it as well or better than anyone else. And, most importantly, nobody else needs to touch it to keep it moving.
That does not mean nobody else can understand it or support it. In fact, the opposite should be true.
But a strong owner makes the process, decisions, risks, next steps, and relevant context easy for others to find. The work should not live solely in the owner’s head—and definitely not in the head of the manager who is trying to keep everything straight.
It should be part of a transparent system of accountability that allows everyone to access the tools, systems, and resources built – without having to take on extra mental or logistical load to do it.
Ownership means you own it. It’s yours. And, just like maintaining a high end sports car or a brand new puppy, ownership is a big responsibility.
The problem with to “go to guy”
An early stage company can get by without proper and diverse ownership, but as they scale, the cracks become visible. Delays, confusion, long hours, and inefficiencies start to mount up until there are too many cracks to count and the foundation starts to shake.
Usually, holding all the cracks together is at least one “go to person”.
These employees are the linchpin of a team or division. They’re the ones who notice what has been dropped and track down missing information. They remember the context from three conversations ago, follow up with people who are late, clarify unclear handoffs, and repair work before it becomes visible to the customer, founder, or executive team.
Your “go to people” are wired for ownership in a way you can’t teach. And, they are excellent at what they do.
At first, their responsiveness looks like a strength. They make the company work. They protect revenue, client relationships, delivery quality, and leadership credibility. People naturally trust them because they can be counted on to succeed.
Over time, the organization begins to depend on them. You depend on them. You brag about them. The whole company practically jokes about how this person must work in their sleep. No one has any idea how they get it all done.
They become accountable for more and more. The “go to person” becomes who everyone checks with before acting. They become the source of truth when systems are incomplete or information is imperfect. They absorb the coordination labor that should be distributed across clear roles and working processes because, well, they just do it so well.
It looks like everything is working beautifully – until this rockstar finally get stretched too thin, feels overwhelmed, or leaves. Then your “go to person” becomes your “single point of failure”.
And, the company starts saying it has an accountability problem. The truth was never accountability. It was lopsided ownership and unhealthy dependence on too few members of the team.
Leaders often create the dependency they resent
A highly competent leader I worked with was trying to build systems that would allow her company to scale. She was creating ways for key information to be visible: the status of deals, client needs, next steps, risks, and ownership.
But the founder wanted immediate answers to highly detailed questions about nearly every deal and every client…all the time.
Instead of using the systems the leader was building, the founder went directly to her.
So she had to chase down increasingly granular details—not because those details mattered to the business, but because she needed to be ready to answer the founder’s questions.
The founder had made this leader the default source of truth. And, as was inevitable, the pattern spread.
Because team members knew the founder was not using the shared tools. They knew that this leader would eventually call them for more detail than was available on the dashboard, so they stopped treating the systems as important.
Key procedures became optional. Information became fragmented. And, our gal became even more involved in the work. She spent all her time anticipating the founder’s questions and preparing to respond effectively stalling the organization’s plans to scale in its tracks.
I cannot tell you how common this is in startup environments.
A founder wants visibility. A leader tries to create a scalable way to provide it. The founder bypasses the system for the fastest available answer.
Employees learn that the system is performative and stop using it. The leader – who is usually the most capable member of the division – carries more and more of the business on their back…until they burnout.
Then, the founder wonders why nobody is taking ownership & teams underperform.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
High standards are not micromanagement
Breaking this cycle requires us to get out of the micromanagement mindset.
It is difficult to watch someone do something differently than you would do it—especially when the work matters, the stakes are high, and you built the company with your own two hands using nothing but grit, radical ownership, and speed.
But, failing to learn how to lead through the discomfort is a slippery slope toward toxic micromanagement and poor results.
You don’t have to lower your standards to avoid micromanagement. Ownership is built on standards – and creates a reliably different environment. Let’s look at some of the biggest differences.
| Ownership | Micromanagement |
|---|---|
| Standards are clear, measurable, and stable | Expectations change based on anxiety, preference, mood, or the latest article a leader has read |
| People know what “done” and “done well” mean | People are left trying to guess what will be criticized next and modulate to avoid the “gotcha” |
| Clearly defined systems make progress and exceptions visible by surfacing them early | Leaders search for errors and pull themselves into unnecessary details to find them |
| Employees can see how they will succeed or fall short against a known bar | Employees are corrected against an invisible, shifting standard |
| Leaders coach toward capability and outcomes | Leaders prescribe method, second-guess judgment, call out failures, or take the work back |
When employees cannot predict what success looks like, they stop exercising judgment. They ask before they act. They wait for approval throughout the work. Or they reduce the quality of their first effort because they assume someone will tear it apart or redo it anyway.
From the leader’s perspective, this looks like low accountability.
But, through the employee lens, it’s just good time management.
Look for learned dependence
Teams learn very quickly what is and is not a good use of their time.
If a manager repeatedly takes work back or publicly blames people for misses, they learn that ownership is risky. If leadership ignores shared systems and goes directly to their trusted linchpin, people learn that documentation is optional & your success depends on your relationship with the “go to” guy or gal. If employees are criticized for decisions they were supposedly empowered to make, they learn to wait.
This kind of learned dependence is unintentionally taught by the very people asking everyone to step up. And, we usually don’t notice it’s even happening until it’s too late.
Some early warning signs include:
- Your team checks with leaders before acting on decisions that sit squarely within their role.
- Work is being delayed by frequent requests for approval or reassurance.
- The quality of first drafts starts to tank. No one is spending time on V1, because they know a lot of their work is going to be thrown out in V2.
- Documentation, dashboards, project plans, and procedures exist but are inconsistently maintained or used. You can’t rely on the data within them so everyone just ends up just calling people to figure out what’s right.
- The same “go to” people are continually pulled into everything. Their answers are considerably better than everyone else’s and you’re starting to rely on them for a lot.
- Leaders write off recurring performance issues primarily as hiring failures: “I hired the wrong person,” “They just didn’t have what it takes,” or “I could not trust them to do this well.”
Sometimes the problem is hiring. Sometimes a person is just genuinely not capable of the role & we missed it in the interview. Sometimes, we’re trying to hire an expensive skillset on a budget and missing the talent we really need.
But more often than not, the organization has hired capable people who could do the job well within clear parameters. But, we’ve failed to equip them with the context, systems, practice, authority, and feedback needed to succeed.
Give people the whole outcome
Ownership is not a personality trait that people either have or they don’t. It’s a systemic structure the organization must possess in order to allow people to develop it.
To transfer meaningful ownership, leaders need to make several things clear right from the start.
1. Define the outcome
Start with what the organization is trying to accomplish—not merely the activity an individual needs to complete.
Clarify:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- Why does it matter?
- What does “done” mean?
- What does “done well” mean?
- What would tell us the work is trending toward an incomplete or unsuccessful outcome?
- Where does this person’s responsibility begin and end?
- When and how does the work hand off to someone else?
People cannot own what they do not understand. So, keep asking questions and defining processes until you stop getting variable results.
2. Clarify authority and constraints
Responsibility without authority can never become ownership.
The person we’re asking to own more needs to know:
- Which decisions they can make independently
- What budget, time, access, or resources they have to help them accomplish their goals
- What constraints are fixed and where there’s flexibility in the systems they own
- Which stakeholders should be consulted
- Who needs to be informed
- What tradeoffs they are authorized to make to achieve the performance standards we’re asking them to achieve
A capable person should not have to seek permission for every judgment call. They should know what they are empowered to do and operate with autonomy and transparency to achieve it.
3. Build visibility without creating surveillance
Ownership should not require a manager to chase updates.
The work needs a visible home: a project plan, operating dashboard, client record, decision log, or another shared resource appropriate to the organization. The right people should be able to see essential status, decisions, risks, deadlines, and next steps without launching a human scavenger hunt.
You’ve got to take your time to build these systems right if you want everyone to use them. And, once they’re in place…you’ve actually got to enforce using them. Yes, even you.
If a founder bypasses the dashboard and calls the same person for the answer every time, the founder is teaching the organization that the dashboard does not matter.
If your “go to person” doesn’t redirect people to the tools you’ve built to keep people informed, the same thing happens and the dashboard quickly gets out of sync with reality.
Data that’s unreliable is useless. And, people will create workarounds that breed chaos so fast it’ll make your head spin.
4. Let people practice inside a safe boundary
Ownership is learned through practice, not generic instructions like “be more proactive.”
People need opportunities to make small mistakes, learn from them, and recover – without major consequence for them or your organization.
Break unfamiliar or high-risk work into manageable steps. Create lower-consequence sandboxes where people can practice judgment free. Allow struggle without treating every imperfection as evidence that the work must be reclaimed.
The old school surgical model of learning is actually really useful in this context. When a surgeon learned a new procedure, they were given the chance to “see one, do one, teach one” as they proceed.
See One: Allow the employee to observe the new task and ask any questions that arise as you perform it to your highest performance standard.
Do One: Allow the employee to complete the task while you observe. Throw in real world hiccups and ask questions as they go. No judgement – just a chance to get their hands dirty and make the task their own.
Teach One: Allow them to teach it back to you. The cognitive burden of having to explain how to do something activates different parts of our brain and helps the details be more memorable.
The goal of the exercise is not perfection. But, it’s an understanding of the how and why of the task.
The problems
Another common place ownership fails is when something is going wrong.
This is where someone presents their problems at your feet like a house cat sharing their trophy of a dead mouse. All problem. No solution.
It sounds like…
“This is broken.” “This team isn’t doing their job.” “I can’t seem to make this work.”
The first step in addressing this trend is internal. We have to avoid the reflexive response of making all their problems disappear.
I know it would be faster if you just fixed it. But, you – my dear sweet ownership minded leader – do not scale. You’ve got to place the burden for resolution squarely into the hands of the person you need to own it.
Instead of rescuing, try saying this instead.
“I think I understand the issue. What have you already tried to resolve it?”
“I get what’s happening. What would you like to do to fix it?”
“Thanks for keeping me in the loop. What’s your plan to address?”
Identifying a problem should include understanding the issue, identify options and next steps, and recommending a path forward. If all anyone offers is problems, they’re not meeting your standard and that needs to be explicitly clear.
You’re looking for the difference between “This process is broken,” and saying, “This process is breaking down at this handoff. I believe we have three options to address it, and here is the one I recommend.”
Start with the people carrying too much
If you want to understand how ownership currently works in your company, begin with the people you rely on most.
Who is always in the middle of the work?
Who knows the status of every major initiative – even if it’s not theirs?
Who gets asked questions because they’ll answer faster or in more detail than a system would allow?
Who cleans up work that other people were supposed to own?
Who would make the business feel immediately unstable if they took a two-week vacation?
Those people are not simply your strongest employees. They are your signals.
They are showing you where knowledge is trapped, where roles are unclear, where processes are not trusted, where decision rights are fuzzy, and where leaders may be rewarding rescue rather than building capacity.
Your approach to ownership is affecting your bottom line whether you’re paying attention to it or not. So, you might as well invest the time to get it right. Together.
Mindshift Advisors is a consulting and coaching firm that specializes in the human operating system of growth. If you want to unlock human psychology to unleash business results, book a free 30 minute call now. Let us help you get ownership right.
