Embedding ownership in an organization
Bill Anderson
CEO of #TeamBayer. Lifelong student of biotechnology. Serving society as a partner in the life sciences. Empowering people to make a meaningful impact with their work.
When I was a child selling fruit and vegetables from my parent’s garden, I learned what it meant — and felt like — to “own the business”. Ownership is the ultimate driver for total commitment, great results — and deep personal fulfillment.?
Achieving a bold ambition requires every single person of a 100,000 + people organization to feel and act like an owner.?
Ownership entails:?
So how does it play out across a large enterprise? How do you make empowerment, accountability and impact real for people in their daily work?
Leaders must step fully into the roles of? Visionary, Architect, Catalyst and Coach.
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As visionaries, leaders provide clarity and inspiration around what realizing the company vision means for their respective teams. As architects, they will enable systems and provide incentives that maximize ownership at the team and individual levels, while also monitoring and adjusting the system to ensure a relentless focus on the highest priority work. As catalysts, they will remove barriers that teams encounter, while also sparking connectivity that helps them accelerate their impact. And as coaches, they will share expertise, experience, wisdom and mentorship so that best practices are disseminated widely and preserved over time.?
Teams represent an epicenter of ownership.?
Teams must be empowered to make decisions, including approaches to work prioritization and resource utilization. There should be systems and incentives that maximize rewards and recognition for achievement of mission-critical outcomes, that roll up to the vision. Where there’s ownership, all team members feel personally invested in achieving key outcomes, which have been co-created together. Importantly, empowerment does not imply lack of constraint. In fact, all empowered teams - from startups to family households - must operate within certain limits around spending, scope, behavior, and other factors. In this way, empowerment and accountability represent foundational aspects of ownership that are inextricably linked. Empowered teams hold accountability for making enterprise-minded decisions, for being good stewards of resources, and for receiving the relevant wisdom of others around the organization that must shape sound decision making. Fundamental to this is accountability to peers, which comes with transparency.
Individuals feel accomplished and edified as a result of their work.?
Ownership isn’t just a win for the vision or the company, but it holds the key to awesome jobs. Jobs where people have a say in their work, an ability to easily move and flex to roles and work to make their greatest impact, where they feel a sense of excitement and where they can pursue work that leverages their strengths, learn new ones, grow progress and be rewarded. This starts with living a company’s operating principles – which are integral to how every individual shows up every day.? Individuals are leaders. Individuals are team members. When an individual notices the system is blocking them, or any of the above isn’t playing true, they take it up with the people around them, figure it out and don't let up.
Hi Bill, great to read your thoughts on ownership "from within", leading to empowerment and accountability. We can see this in real life how we developed vision and ownership on different levels, starting in small courageous teams and to a certain degree as a "grass roots" movement, for the cell & gene therapy strategy in Bayer, that lead to the great efforts in gene and cell therapies that we now undertake with the teams at AskBio and BlueRock. Adding one word to the discussion I suggest "courage" to take the necessary leaps. Regards, Ralph.
Principal CMO Site Manager and Technical Development Team Leader
2 年Hi Bill, what is your advise to us - individuals - to be able to foster this mindset move at our Leadership Team level(s)? How can we influence it? Have you been in this situation before and could you share your experience?
Senior Director, National Accounts
2 年Outstanding read. I have heard leaders say ownership is about balancing empowerment and accountability which creates a false reality of it being a trade off. What I love is the notion of maximum empowerment AND accountability resulting in impact. Thank you for sharing! Great job!
CEO @Clinakos | Healthcare Data Enthusiast | Medical AI/ML | Hiring |
2 年Makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing Bill Anderson
Chapter Lead Data Insights and Process Excellence, Post Market Quality Diagnostics
2 年Thanks for sharing Bill Anderson. The question I ask myself is, why did you feel a sense of ownership, accountability and empowerment when you sold the fruit and vegetables from your parent’s garden? What makes a job an "awesome job (...) where people feel a sense of excitement and where they can pursue work that leverages their strengths, learn new ones, grow progress and be rewarded?" I think it comes back to the question of meaning, and I believe meaning has many faces, not just one:? Purposeful meaning (as the service to others), eschatological meaning (toward a hopeful future), playful meaning (by getting lost in the here and now, ie flow state), dialogical meaning (by engaging with and appreciating each other), bodily and narrative meaning (by experiencing and interacting with the world, and by writing and telling your own story).? I think many of these levels were served when you were selling fruit and vegetables from your parent’s garden. Let's make our workplace this small fruit and vegetable stall.