The team says yes and carries on as before.
The meeting went well. You named the problem, everyone recognised it, and at the end there was an agreement nobody objected to. Three weeks later you are back at the same table. The same agreement is on the agenda again. Nobody said no. Nothing happened either.
Then the word ownership comes up. The team needs to take more ownership. People need to keep their agreements. You say it, you put it in the annual plan and you hope it lands.
But ownership is not a decision people take after an appeal. It is behaviour, and behaviour appears or disappears with the situation someone works in. If you want to change that behaviour, you are in the business of influence: having an effect on what people choose and do, also when you are not in the room.
Ownership is the behaviour of people who treat a task or result as their own: they start without being prompted, finish what they committed to and speak up when it goes wrong. You rarely build ownership by asking for it. You build it by making agreements concrete, letting people help build the solution and removing what makes following through hard. More on changing behaviour →
What is ownership?
Ownership is behaving as if the result is yours. You do not wait until someone asks, you solve what you run into and you let people know when something is not working. In teams you see it in small things: who takes the first step after the meeting, who asks on when an agreement stays vague, who picks up a problem that falls just outside their task.
The word is often used as a character trait. That colleague has ownership, the other one does not. That does not help much, because you cannot adjust a character. You can adjust behaviour. The same employee who waits and sees at work may well organise an entire tournament for the sports club at the weekend. Nothing about the person has changed. Only the situation is different.
So taking ownership is something people do when the circumstances allow it. For anyone who leads a team, that is a more useful starting point than asking who has it and who does not.
Why does your team say yes and carry on as before?
Your team says yes and carries on as before because an intention and an action are two different things. In 2016, psychologists Paschal Sheeran and Thomas Webb reviewed the research on that gap.[1] Their conclusion on how large it is:
"... intentions get translated into action approximately one-half of the time."
Paschal Sheeran and Thomas Webb, Social and Personality Psychology Compass (2016)
About half of what people intend to do actually happens. The interesting part is who causes the gap. It is mainly people who intended to act and then did not. They meant their yes.
Sheeran and Webb also describe where it goes wrong. People forget to start, miss the right moment or get pulled off course by something more urgent at that moment. In one of the studies they cite, eight per cent of participants had forgotten an intended action after just five seconds. When their attention was divided, that rose to almost a quarter.
Put that next to your meeting. The agreement was sincere. Then everyone went back to a full inbox, a client on the phone and a colleague with a question. The intention had no moment, no place and no first step. It only had agreement.
That also explains why holding people to account achieves so little. If you confront a colleague about an agreement that was not kept, you treat it as unwillingness. Usually it was willingness without a plan.
Can you impose ownership?
No, and trying makes it worse. Imposing ownership is a contradiction: you ask someone to see something as theirs while you decide what it is, how it should be done and when it is finished.
In 2000, psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci of the University of Rochester described what people need in order to get moving of their own accord: the feeling that they are capable, that they choose for themselves and that they belong.[2] They also summarise what breaks that self-motivation down. Threats, deadlines, directives, pressured evaluations and imposed goals. Choice and room to shape the work yourself do the opposite.
For ownership in teams that is awkward news. The reflex when agreements are not kept is to steer more tightly: an action list, a deadline, a checkpoint. In the short term that produces movement. It also removes what ownership lives on.
There is a second source of ownership, and it is more practical. In a series of experiments published in 2012, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely had participants put things together themselves: an IKEA storage box, origami, a Lego set.[3] Those who had built their own box bid 78 cents for it on average. Those who were offered the very same box ready-made bid 48 cents. The researchers called it the IKEA effect. There was one condition. The effect disappeared when people did not finish what they were building, or had to take it apart again afterwards.
So people become attached to what they have made and finished themselves. An agreement that you worded and they approved has stayed yours.
What holds employees back from taking ownership?
You only see what holds employees back from taking ownership when you stop asking for more of it and look at the forces acting on someone. At SUE we use the SUE | Influence Framework© for that, the model from Behavioural Design that maps, per person or team, what moves people towards new behaviour and what keeps them with the old.[4]
Two forces move towards ownership. The pains: the hassle of the same items on the agenda again and again, waiting for someone else, work that stays undone. The gains: room to do it your own way, being seen, finishing something you are proud of.
Two forces hold it back, and they are usually stronger. The comforts: waiting is safe, the manager will sort it out in the end, and if nobody starts, nobody stands out. The anxieties: what if I pick it up and it goes wrong? Am I even allowed to decide this? Will I be stuck with it from now on?
That last question is rarely asked out loud and is often the most important one. Anyone in a team who picks something up once and then finds it on their plate for good learns quickly not to move first.
A yes in the meeting is an intention. Ownership starts with the first step after it.
Building ownership: five things that work
Five interventions you can use in your very next meeting.
1. Turn every agreement into an if-then plan
Never close an agreement with "we'll pick that up". Keep asking until it says who does what, at which moment and what the first action is. Sheeran and Webb call this type of plan one of the best-researched ways to turn an intention into action. A meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect compared with an intention alone.
2. Let the team word the agreement
Name the problem and leave the solution to the people who have to carry it out. Their wording is rarely more elegant than yours. It is theirs, though, and that is the IKEA effect at work.
3. Make the task small enough to finish
The IKEA effect disappears with half-finished work. Cut a large change into pieces that can be finished within a week. Something finished builds more ownership than something big that lingers.
4. Take away the fear of moving first
Say in advance what happens if it goes wrong, and what does not. Agree that picking something up does not mean keeping it for ever. That removes the two anxieties that hold people back most.
5. Come back to the plan and leave the person alone
If an agreement was not kept, ask what got in the way and adjust the plan. Holding someone to account makes sense when they did not want to. Usually they did want to and the moment was missing.
What do you do when agreements are not kept?
When agreements are not kept, look at the agreement first and at the people second. Three questions help. Was it clear who would take the first step? Was there a moment attached to it? And was it doable for that person alongside their regular work?
If the answer is yes three times and still nothing happens, something else is going on. Often it is an objection that was not voiced in the meeting. That is the subject of the article on dealing with resistance to change. If backing for the plan itself is missing, read building support for change. And if you want to know what gets people moving apart from agreements: how to motivate employees.
Frequently asked questions about ownership
What does ownership mean at work?
Ownership means treating a task or result as if it were yours. You start without being asked, finish what you committed to and report it when something is not working. At work it is mainly behaviour you can see, not a trait someone has or lacks.
How do you build a sense of ownership in employees?
You build ownership by letting people help build the solution, making agreements concrete with a moment and a first step, and keeping tasks small enough to finish. Also remove what makes picking something up risky, such as uncertainty about what someone is allowed to decide.
Why don't people follow through on agreements?
People usually fail to follow through because the intention had no plan, rarely because they did not want to. According to Sheeran and Webb (2016), about half of all intentions are turned into action. Forgetting to start, missing the moment and getting distracted are the ordinary causes.
What is the pitfall of ownership?
The pitfall of ownership is that you start demanding it. According to Ryan and Deci (2000), imposed goals, deadlines and control undermine self-motivation. A second pitfall is that whoever picks something up gets it for good. That teaches a team to wait.
Can you learn to take ownership?
Yes, although a team learns it faster than an individual. Taking ownership becomes easier when agreements have a fixed form, when people experience that picking things up is safe and when they can finish something. Those are features of the work situation, and a manager can design them.
Conclusion
A team that says yes and carries on as before is rarely a team that does not want to. It is a team with intentions without a plan, agreements that belong to someone else and good reasons not to move first. More appeals for ownership change none of that.
What does work is influence: understanding which forces shape your team's behaviour and setting up the situation so that following through becomes the easy route. In The Art of Influence© online you learn how people choose and how to design your meetings, your agreements and your change around that.
Once you have made ownership possible, you no longer have to ask for it.