Ownership: Turning passengers into drivers
November 29, 2024
How do I engage and align our people? How do I drive productivity? These are questions 90% of CEOs are asking as they struggle to create agile, high-performance cultures.
Entrepreneurially-minded organisations achieve agility not by having a purpose but what they do with it. Careful observation of the best agile, entrepreneurial businesses provides some answers. They just use purpose in an entirely different way. These agile, entrepreneurially-minded businesses have a clearly defined set of attributes within their cultures that are the secret to bridging the 'purpose gap'.
The power of ownership
With trust and context, comes the next major attribute of entrepreneurially-minded, purposeful businesses: a company-wide feeling of, and desire for, OWNERSHIP.
Unless everyone in the organisation feels – and feels allowed to feel – a powerful sense of psychological ownership of the business it will not flow through into agile employee behaviours.
Organisations in which everyone feels an emotional investment demonstrate employee behaviours of alignment, engagement and autonomy. And the simplest and most compelling route to creating a culture of ownership is to create a feeling of ownership of the purpose the organisation serves.
From control to self-responsibility
Organisations need to reframe the relationship between the company and the employees from one of control to one of self responsibility.
This is about a critical shift in how management at every level of the organisation thinks and behaves and about shifting the relationship between the company and the employees from one of control to one of self responsibility.
Research in a large pharma/medical group suffering from a significant problem of engagement and motivation uncovered an intriguing truth. Although disillusionment in most managers was resulting in ineffective decision-making and a critical lack of strategic implementation, a small group thought and behaved in an entirely different way.
This group felt emotional ownership of the organisation an extraordinary 45% more strongly than the median manager, which translated into some remarkable differences in their commitment, effectiveness and willingness to take responsibility for successful outcomes.
Purpose as the driver of ownership
And what made these managers different from their peers came down to one thing: the degree to which they believed in the purpose the business served.
It was clear that individuals who felt their company to be authentically purposeful (as distinct from having a stated purpose) had a far higher sense of ownership and responsibility, and were consequently dramatically more effective as managers (as well as, incidentally, being far more joyful and far less likely to quit).
Bridging the purpose gap
It's easy to agree that purpose is a good thing for employees and for society at large. But with the life expectancy of a S&P 500 company down to 15 years, it's also easy to identify that the behaviours of aligned, engaged staff, open, innovative cultures and agile, clear-headed management are the key to survival.
The problem is the gap between purpose and behaviour.
Without ownership, muddle, distrust and cynicism will persevere in middle management and purpose will not take root. What drives the extraordinary agility of the best entrepreneurial businesses is that purposefulness is credibly, congruently, consistently and authentically lived in the organisation. It is that which unlocks the human capital in the business allowing both people, and the business itself, to achieve their full potential.
Without a sense of ownership, no business can hope to be agile. And in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world that can make all the difference.
Continue Reading:
Ownership transforms engagement, but it doesn't work in isolation. Explore the other essential pillars of entrepreneurial agility:
Trust: The foundation of agile, purposeful cultures - Understand why trust is the prerequisite for purpose to take root and drive real change.
Context: Managing with clarity and velocity - Discover how contextual management creates the decision-making speed that separates agile businesses from the rest.
Entrepreneurially-minded organisations achieve agility not by having a purpose but what they do with it. Careful observation of the best agile, entrepreneurial businesses provides some answers. They just use purpose in an entirely different way. These agile, entrepreneurially-minded businesses have a clearly defined set of attributes within their cultures that are the secret to bridging the 'purpose gap'.
The power of ownership
With trust and context, comes the next major attribute of entrepreneurially-minded, purposeful businesses: a company-wide feeling of, and desire for, OWNERSHIP.
Unless everyone in the organisation feels – and feels allowed to feel – a powerful sense of psychological ownership of the business it will not flow through into agile employee behaviours.
Organisations in which everyone feels an emotional investment demonstrate employee behaviours of alignment, engagement and autonomy. And the simplest and most compelling route to creating a culture of ownership is to create a feeling of ownership of the purpose the organisation serves.
From control to self-responsibility
Organisations need to reframe the relationship between the company and the employees from one of control to one of self responsibility.
This is about a critical shift in how management at every level of the organisation thinks and behaves and about shifting the relationship between the company and the employees from one of control to one of self responsibility.
Research in a large pharma/medical group suffering from a significant problem of engagement and motivation uncovered an intriguing truth. Although disillusionment in most managers was resulting in ineffective decision-making and a critical lack of strategic implementation, a small group thought and behaved in an entirely different way.
This group felt emotional ownership of the organisation an extraordinary 45% more strongly than the median manager, which translated into some remarkable differences in their commitment, effectiveness and willingness to take responsibility for successful outcomes.
Purpose as the driver of ownership
And what made these managers different from their peers came down to one thing: the degree to which they believed in the purpose the business served.
It was clear that individuals who felt their company to be authentically purposeful (as distinct from having a stated purpose) had a far higher sense of ownership and responsibility, and were consequently dramatically more effective as managers (as well as, incidentally, being far more joyful and far less likely to quit).
Bridging the purpose gap
It's easy to agree that purpose is a good thing for employees and for society at large. But with the life expectancy of a S&P 500 company down to 15 years, it's also easy to identify that the behaviours of aligned, engaged staff, open, innovative cultures and agile, clear-headed management are the key to survival.
The problem is the gap between purpose and behaviour.
Without ownership, muddle, distrust and cynicism will persevere in middle management and purpose will not take root. What drives the extraordinary agility of the best entrepreneurial businesses is that purposefulness is credibly, congruently, consistently and authentically lived in the organisation. It is that which unlocks the human capital in the business allowing both people, and the business itself, to achieve their full potential.
Without a sense of ownership, no business can hope to be agile. And in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world that can make all the difference.
Continue Reading:
Ownership transforms engagement, but it doesn't work in isolation. Explore the other essential pillars of entrepreneurial agility:
Trust: The foundation of agile, purposeful cultures - Understand why trust is the prerequisite for purpose to take root and drive real change.
Context: Managing with clarity and velocity - Discover how contextual management creates the decision-making speed that separates agile businesses from the rest.
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