A common complaint at companies we visit is that employees lack ownership in their work.
As an owner or director, you often feel very responsible for what happens in the business, but your people may not. They often don’t do what they promise. Or they don’t perform their duties the way you had in mind or in their job description.
Why is that anyway? I a blog article like this I won’t pretend to be able to answer the all-encompassing answer in a page for all businesses in all situations. But there are some common reasons we can mention here. See for yourself and for your business if this is recognizable:
✓ Your people feel like it doesn’t really matter what they do anyway. There is no clear goal toward which the company is headed.
✓ There is no clear job description for your people with what they are supposed to do and how you are going to measure that at the end of the month/quarter/year.
✓ Your employees are doing work that doesn’t suit them or motivate them. Are you really looking closely at what they want from their careers and supporting them in this?
✓ Management itself does not always show ownership either. You can want your people to perform optimally, but if you don’t always set a good example yourself, you’re screwed.
✓ There are no consequences if your people don’t do what they should do. Nothing is said or done about it, you allow bad behavior.
✓ You don’t delegate enough responsibility. People can only show ownership if they actually own something.
Perhaps you recognize one or more of the symptoms in this list in this company or you wonder how your employees actually feel about this. Or maybe you yourself are an employee in such a company.
It’s also not easy to do all the above things right all the time, and especially when things are going well in the business and we’re all busy then good leadership and good personnel management sometimes falls by the wayside. You can afford that for a while, but not in the long run if you want to keep a positive work culture.
In that case, we can help by embarking on a journey together to see how we can (further) improve or embed ownership or other behaviors in your company. Here we always look at both the hard side of things (company goals, task descriptions, structure of progress meetings) and the soft side (leadership, core values and culture of the company). Usually we can offer these trajectories with the help of subsidies, so ask us about the possibilities.
Author:
Lizanne Jakobs is founder of Brilliant Work, a business coaching and consulting firm with a team of energetic, experienced experts. She herself has been active as a business coach since 2010. This article may be reproduced as long as the source is always cited.
