CHAPTER 5

Creating Ownership

One of the ultimate goals for a team is to have the ability to identify problem or challenge areas as they arise and to then self-correct. This is an extremely challenging undertaking, but doable. The previous four chapters lay the groundwork for the practice of self-correcting, which comes from adopting a learning mindset, fostering adaptive practices, and paying attention to the psychological safety of the team. When teams reach this state of self-correction, the degree of ownership can increase dramatically. In this chapter we wish to further explore the concept of ownership—what it is, how it differs from “buy-in,” and how it can be an incredible source of leverage for your teams.

Buy-in or Ownership?

It will first be helpful to be clear about what we mean by “ownership.” In this context, we are talking about members of a team feeling that they have a very real stake in their work, that they have the ability to not just offer input, but to actually make change. This means that team members are involved in not just creating solutions, but also in the process of diagnosing or understanding the situation, event, challenge, or opportunity. This requires complete transparency so that all team members have access to the same information (McCandless and Lipmanowicz 2014).

Let us take a moment to make a distinction between ownership and buy-in. The term “buy-in” is frequently heard in our organizations, and is usually uttered by those in leadership roles. A new initiative or process is created and now the leaders need the rest of the team (or entire organization, for that matter) to buy-in to the initiative. When the term buy-in is used, it is with good intention. The leaders truly want others to adopt the new practice, methodology, process, or standard and they believe that, by communicating the new procedures, and the reasons behind them, and then putting in place specific policies or rules to follow, performance will follow. As leaders, we are then surprised when we encounter resistance in the trenches, or the new performance we are seeking does not materialize.

One of the significant challenges with wanting to create more ownership is that leaders are by default required to give up some level of control. One question then to ask yourself as a leader is are you interested in garnering compliance or do you want genuine ownership? If your aim is to have compliance (staff follow what they are told to do, or what is spelled out by leadership), then we would suggest you might not yet be ready to move toward full-on ownership.

Amy Edmondson relates a study she undertook demonstrating the impact a learning approach can have on how a new minimally invasive cardiac surgery procedure was introduced in 16 different hospital systems. She discovered that those physician leaders who championed a learning approach and engaged their teams in the implementation process were far more successful with the full-scale implementation of the device (Edmondson 2012). The parallel we would draw is that, as a result of engaging in a learning process, these leaders actually generated a high degree of ownership. The new procedure typified an adaptive challenge—adopting it required changes in both technology/equipment and in how the team would have to function together. Narrowing her focus to four hospitals, two community hospitals, and two larger academic medical centers, she discovered that the way the leaders in each institution framed the adoption of the new procedure was the most critical factor in determining successful implementation.

In the two hospitals that experienced successful implementation, the two surgeon leaders used an approach that framed the situation and was upfront about the challenges, and also fully engaged the surgical team in the adoption of the new procedure. Edmondson states: “To succeed in implementing change or transforming the way work is accomplished, leaders must frame their role in the project in ways that invite others to participate fully” (Edmondson 2012).

While we agree wholeheartedly with Edmondson’s conclusions, we also believe that these leader actions result in a much higher degree of ownership on the part of the team, leader included.

Earlier we described how a large outpatient specialty center invited their patients to participate in testing out a patient self-rooming process. As the administrative director and the medical director prepared for the relocation to the new site, they planned and held a retreat for the entire clinic team where they were able to generate ideas for how to make the move to the new building more efficient, which also included modifying and re-designing processes. After the move was complete, the administrative director and his clinic leadership team conducted daily debriefs. The leaders of each clinic area (or pod, as they called them) would conduct the debrief and then send the results to the director, who would compile the feedback and use the information to conduct the next morning’s brief. This way, the staff were able to see how their input and feedback directly helped to shape the next day’s brief. They also held periodic all-staff meetings, but these were not structured as a typical meeting where people sat passively while others spoke “at” them. Rather, real situations were shared that were creating challenges for the clinic, and the participants were invited to help generate solutions, often working in small groups. These meetings were not all-day events, either; typically they lasted 90 to 120 minutes, but at the conclusion people felt they had actionable items to work on. Again, a sense of ownership and identity flourished as a result.

Henry Lipmanowicz (co-creator of LS) believes that anytime leaders start using the term “buy-in” it should be considered a warning sign that they are not doing enough to involve their people up front in the design or planning process and, as a result, they run the risk of alienating folks or inadvertently creating resistance.

Lipmanowicz also cautions against relying too heavily on adopting the so-called best practices from other institutions or consulting groups. The reason for his caution is that the practices in question were developed and implemented within a specific culture and context, and simply importing the practice in question may not work at all in your particular culture or context (McCandless and Lipmanowicz 2014). This is an interesting, if not somewhat heretical, assertion since seeking out best practices is a very common strategy in today’s organizations, and one that is also touted by many consulting groups. Yet it also makes good sense, and perhaps helps to explain why so many change efforts fail to meet their stated objectives. He suggests three questions for leaders to address when considering importing a best practice:

Is the process designed to

If the challenge is adaptive in nature, Lipmanowicz argues, it makes the best sense to follow a strategy aimed to achieve ownership. This supports Heifetz’s mantra of mobilizing people and enabling them to do the work that is required to meet the challenge. Again, the process of diagnose, interpret, and intervene can apply here.

There is perhaps a risk that this notion of “mobilizing” others to create ownership could go the way of the empowerment craze of years ago. Empowerment, once hailed as a liberating process itself, was the approach that would allow people to take charge of their own direction, their own futures, in order to meet organizational goals. Today, empowerment is often considered an overused, overly optimistic buzz word that simply is not very evident in today’s workplace. Our perspective is that empowerment may simply have gotten a bad rap. What was not well acknowledged during the heyday of empowerment is the critical role leaders play in creating the conditions that would make empowerment possible. It is also likely that many leaders viewed the empowerment movement as an affront on their own leadership responsibilities and could very well have been perceived as a loss of control.

In our minds it comes back to how does the leader see his or her role? We are arguing that in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world, leaders need to do more to create a learning environment, which in turn leads to teams being more adaptive to a changing environment, and ultimately engenders a higher degree of ownership on the part of team members—this is essentially the case we are attempting to make in this book.

Generating Ownership

Going down the path of generating ownership is without a doubt a function of leadership. The previous three chapters provided detail about creating a learning environment, creating the conditions for psychological safety, and creating adaptive teams. All of the strategies presented can certainly contribute to creating ownership, but we would like to add the following strategies:

Give the Work Back to the People Closest to the Work (also known as FLO)

We realize that we run the risk of this statement coming across as a mere platitude. If it were this easy, wouldn’t we all be doing it? The reality is that leaders must make this a deliberate choice, and must be comfortable enough in their own skin to let go of control so that the front-line employees truly can take on the work—even if they resist it at first.

This is probably one of the biggest hurdles to overcome—you, as the leader, make the commitment to give the problem-solving work back to the staff, and yet they resist all of your attempts to do this. You hear comments like, “I thought it was your job to figure this out,” or “I don’t have time to figure this out, I’m busy with patient care. I couldn’t possibly take the extra time it would take to work on this.” The reality is that many of us have simply become used to depending on others (leaders) to make decisions for us, or to tackle the really tough problems.

Years ago, James Belasco and Ralph Stayer wrote a book entitled Flight of the Buffalo, where they addressed this very issue (Belasco and Stayer 1993). As leaders themselves, Belasco and Stayer discovered they had been responsible for taking on too many problems that could be solved at a local level, if employees were allowed to do so. They committed to a new approach that, when an employee brought them a problem to solve, rather than taking it on (as they had consistently done in the past) they would instead give it back to that employee by saying something like, “That sounds like a really interesting problem, Seth, what do you think you can do about it?”

The initial reaction from the individuals, as you might imagine, was shock, followed by resistance (or in some cases, resentment). Folks were simply not used to this new method, and so they responded the way we would expect folks to respond, by getting defensive and looking for ways to throw it back to the leader. But they held their ground, and soon they began to see results. Folks would go back, think about it, and eventually begin to come up with ideas on how to address the challenge they were facing. Pretty soon, they stopped coming by at all, because they were just jumping in working to resolve things. If they needed assistance, they knew they could ask for it, and then [authors] could consider taking a more active role.

Kurt actually put this strategy to use during his time in the Coast Guard. While managing a group at a large training center, and having read the Flight of the Buffalo, the next time one of his direct reports came to him with a problem to solve, he listened, and then asked the team member what he thought he should do about it. (He was incredibly worried that this approach would not work at all.) This response was not met with welcome arms. At least at first. But he held his ground and after a short while, this team member was telling him about the challenges that had come up and how he had dealt with them on his own. It completely changed the dynamics.

The point is to not come across as being dismissive, but rather supportive of the team members, entrusting them, really. And while some degree of resistance can be expected, sticking with the process is a must because, as soon as you fall back to old habits, the culture of dependence returns.

Frame the Situation for Learning

We spoke quite a bit about what teams need to do to learn in Chapter 2; one of the leadership behaviors espoused by Amy Edmondson is that of “framing the situation for learning” (Edmondson 2012). Her point is that leaders need to take the necessary step of telling their team that the opportunities and challenges they face present a tremendous learning opportunity, and that they will do this learning together. Providing a supportive environment, while simultaneously challenging people to take initiative to solve problems, can seem like a paradox or a polarity. Rather than viewing this as an “either/or” choice, we see it as a “both/and” opportunity. Challenging people to solve a problem on their own and tap into their creativity does not mean we don’t support them. The key is in how the challenge is presented, thus the focus on framing the situation as a learning opportunity.

Use Liberating Structures to Engage People in New Ways

In the previous chapter we introduced you to the revolutionary engagement process of LS, and now we would like to reemphasize its use and importance in generating ownership. The value of using any of the microstructures is that they are fundamentally designed to get people engaged in talking about the real issues at hand. It is hard to opt out, because the design is all-inclusive—everyone has the ability to have a voice, which is, in one sense, the simplest definition of psychological safety. Another factor that makes the use of LS so compelling is that, for many (if not most) of the microstructures, they can be used with groups of any size. Scale is not important. Using them with a group of five is just as engaging as with a group of one hundred. What is more important is making sure you have the right people in the room. The ones whose voices really matter. The ones who have a stake in the process and the outcome.

Some of the specific microstructures that enable collaborative decision making include:

We encourage you to experiment with the various microstructures as a way to further increase shared ownership. Start small and test one of them out. See what kind of results you get, and then adapt and build from there.

In today’s team-based climates, creating ownership is critical and it is the leader’s responsibility to set the stage for this to occur. We have presented several ideas here that contribute to the understanding of ownership, as well as the implementation, but at the end of the day it comes back to asking yourself, what are you really after?

To further illustrate the power of creating ownership, consider the following example from a University of Washington (UW) MHA student from an assignment on change and leadership:

This is an excellent example of how ownership can be enhanced using group process, and how leadership can set the stage.

In Summary

In this chapter we have attempted to make the case for generating higher levels of ownership within teams, and the first step, in our minds, is to have a clearer understanding of the distinction between buy-in and ownership. Understanding this distinction allows leaders to be more mindful of what their goals truly are, and also causes them to pay better attention to which words they are using, and understand how people typically interpret these words.

Using strategies to get people engaged directly in the work makes a difference in generating the conditions for ownership to occur, so the leader needs to be aware of the actions taken to either help or hinder these conditions. In the next chapter, we examine what leaders can do to become more aware of how their own biases and worldview shape their actions and either encourage or inhibit engagement and ownership—and ultimately, team performance.

End of Chapter Reflective Questions

References

Belasco, J.A., and R.C. Stayer. 1993. Flight of the Buffalo. Dove Audio.

Edmondson, A.C. 2012. Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. John Wiley & Sons.

McCandless, K., and H. Lipmanowicz. 2014. The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures. Liberating Structures Press.