Strategy #6: Move from accountability to ownership

Accountability can be a good thing: it’s important that people be held accountable for meeting the requirements of the job. The most important accountability, however, is that to which we hold ourselves. That’s when you move from accountability to ownership. Accountability implies supervision by the person holding you accountable; in other words, having someone look over your shoulder, at least metaphorically speaking. In the eyes of the employee, to be “held accountable” can be perceived as being disempowering. It implies being told what to do, and then having your feet held in the fire in order to make you do it. Ownership, on the other hand, says that you hold yourself accountable because you feel an important part of the organization and its undertakings. It says that you are thinking like a partner, and not merely like a hired hand.

The obvious way to create a sense of ownership is to provide people with stock options and the like. But that’s not necessary, and in many organizations (for example, nonprofit organizations or closely-held family companies) not even possible. As with monetary compensation, a real sense of ownership does not always require having a financial stake in the business. I’ve worked with nurses who feel like they own a piece of their hospital, and with executives for whom stock in the company is merely another form of self-enrichment.

Try this: Print up a Certificate of Ownership for each of your employees. The certificate should encourage them to see their job description as a floor, not a ceiling; as the platform upon which they add their own special touches, not as a limitation on what and how they may contribute to the goals of the organization (see the next action step for more suggestions on this). After the CEO of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska gave every employee a Certificate of Ownership, he sent me an email saying that it was one of the most wildly popular things he’d ever done for his people!

“Most human beings crave an explicit statement of value – a perspective on what counts as being true, beautiful, and good.”

Howard Gardner: Leading Minds

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