Build Ownership Summary

SHARE THE WHY AND CREATE FREEDOM IN THE HOW

As humans, we’re motivated by the need to create, learn and make a better world. We yearn to do something that gives us a sense of purpose and ties us to something bigger. When we manage to find that, we get this real rush, this dopamine buzz of status and belonging, we’re part of something meaningful that makes a difference. This is something managers can really help with when trying to create ownership with your team.

• Create a sense of your vision and the organizational priorities.

• Help people to see the connection between their work and what the organization is trying to achieve.

• Communicate about what’s important and what really has meaning, explaining the "why" and setting the north star.

You’re setting the direction, and then you can be clear that you’re allowing or that you’re encouraging freedom in working out the path to get there. Really be explicit about that, and mean it.

If you’re asking someone to do something, be specific about that, and be specific about why you’re asking them. This is also important if you’re asking for some work. Maybe you’re saying why you think you should do it, why you think it’s important. And this is going to set everyone up for a creative and innovative process.

AGREE ON EXPECTATIONS AND THE DEFINITION OF SUCCESS

Our brain really likes having clear expectations. If we haven’t got clear expectations, our brain does a great job of trying to fill in the gaps and make them up for us. Mostly this is really useful. It gives us the certainty that we crave. But it can lead to disappointment when the expectations that we’ve made up are not met. So if you’re sharing ownership, we really need clarity about these expectations on both sides, so we know that at least our stories that we’re making up are aligned. There are practical questions you can ask:

• What is the work?

• What are the expected outcomes?

• What does success look like?

• When do you have to deliver it by?

• How much autonomy do you have?

• What can you make decisions about?

• What are the consequences for not delivering?

• What difference does it make to the team or to the project?

• How connected will you as the manager be?

• What kind of support can someone expect when they’re doing this piece of work?

If you’re very clear in setting the expectations you will avoid disappointment and build strong relationships.

You can have these conversations at the beginning of a project or piece of work, but things change, as we know, so it’s important to also have this as a regular conversation. Keep adjusting your expectations along the way. Even if you have ownership, make sure that you keep communicating upwards or across so that you’re telling what you’re learning and finding out. That will give your manager the opportunity to support you but also to champion you, to acknowledge you across the organization and personally.

AN OWNERSHIP EXAMPLE

Say we take ownership of a particular piece of work and don’t have very much direction from our manager. Without information to the contrary, we might get really excited and interpret their silence as that golden opportunity to run off and be creative, and come up with something really innovative and exciting. We dig in, research, get creative, and come up with something that we think is brilliant and innovative. Then we go to our manager and it turns out that their expectation was that you’d be working on something quite quick and easy, doesn’t involve too much work or thinking, and is quite similar to what’s been done before. Oh, the pain is almost physical, you feel so disappointed! All of that can be overcome just by setting expectations in the first place.

• What are the parameters within which we’ve got autonomy?

• What are the expectations?

• What does success look like?

• How much in terms of time and resources will this take?

• What is good enough?

EMBRACE FAILURE & CELEBRATE WHAT WORKS

If you want to build or take ownership, you need to live with a certain amount of failure. Things do go wrong and that's ripe ground for learning. If we become scared of failure, we'll never try anything. We need to have a growth mindset, where we know that our abilities can grow, and that we're learning the most when we're struggling with something, or when something appears to go wrong.

The negativity bias in our brains can make failure feel quite crushing and we can really concentrate on it. We need to reframe it and create new neural pathways so we know in our heads that this is an opportunity, one for growth and doing something different.

We can support this kind of growth in each other:

• You can say, "I have faith in you." "I think you can do this."

• We can help people see what they have learned, even if the outcome may feel like a failure. There's often learning in the process that we can celebrate and replicate.

• We can also point out what has worked and try to reinforce that. Any sense of praise gives a real dopamine rush and can lift us out of the doldrums and create that positive new path around failure.

There other ways that you can try and create those reward moments.

• You can break a big project down into lots of little pieces. That creates these moments to pause and celebrate and say what's worked.

• You can use your regular check-ins or one-to-ones. Keep celebrating what's happened! Keep the motivation up.

Make sure that those moments, those punctuation marks, feel like celebration moments rather than just checking in on people.