Leaders Inspire Employees to Take Ownership of their Work- Behind the Scenes
When your people go beyond responsibility, they are taking ownership of their work. They take ownership of the client experience. Ownership is YES or NO. Ownership is black or white. Ownership is not grey like responsibility. As a leader, you can inspire employees into taking ownership without financial tools like options, shares, profit-sharing, or any money. Today, we look at how you can inspire employees to take ownership. We look at three moves in leadership that encourage people to take ownership of their work. I will explain how this applies to you and your leadership in today’s video.
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Leaders Inspire Employees to Take Ownership: The Transcript
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Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
Inspiring employees. You know as a leader that you have to inspire employees to go beyond just responsibility for their work. You have to inspire them to take real ownership of their projects, the client experience and anything in front of them. When they take ownership, it’s real loyalty. Ownership is yes or no. Ownership is black or white. But the problem is responsibility has many shades of grey.
[0:31]
I’ve been talking about this for ages. I want to create something very specific for you, as a leader so that you could make three strategic moves, not spend any money, but actually get a high-value return out of that by inspiring your employees to go beyond responsibility to take ownership. When I speak on big stages, I talk about ownership in this way. There’s a big question I want to ask you. Do you remember your first car Do you remember what color it was? I remember my first car. It was crap brown in color. It had nearly 80,000 miles on it was many, many decades ago. But that car was special to me because I owned it. I also asked audiences Do you remember your last rental car? What color that was? Most people can’t tell you. Even if they had just rented it that day. There’s no emotional connection to those things that you take responsibility for, like a rental car. You own it, if you wreck it, but that car you own. There’s an emotional connection.
[1:37]
Today we’re going to talk about what you can do as a leader to inspire employees to take ownership of their work. Now, let me be clear, you don’t have to use profit-sharing options, or any kind of financial tools or even money to have people take ownership. You’re probably wondering, how do you do that? Well, it all depends on how they feel. about the environment that you’re creating for them, how they feel about the work that they’re doing, and how they feel about you. When you give people a sense of ownership, they are loyal. They make critical decisions that allow the business to move forward. When something goes wrong, they don’t ignore it, they actually figure out a way to solve that problem and move forward. They think like owners. So let’s go into those three strategic moves that you can do as a leader to inspire employees to take ownership.
[2:31]
The first one is safety. When people feel a sense of safety in their work, they’re not going to be judged for making a decision. They’re not going to be fired, and they feel connected to all of the people that they work with. This sense of safety is necessary for your business to thrive. When you think about your leadership, you want to make sure that those people feel that safety they feel a sense of having clarity around what the business is doing and how you’re treating them. Safety in the Aristotle program that Google ran a few years back was the number one factor of high-performance teams. If you looked at the study, I’ve written about it many times for ink magazine and for other publications. The highest factor for a successful team is a sense of psychological safety. I talked with managers at Google about this that were listed in that research. And they explained to me how important it was as a leader to give people a sense of safety in every conversation they’re having, and as they work on difficult projects, and as things are changing.
[3:47]
After safety, you want to look at empowerment. Are you truly empowering your people to have owned their own opinions to make decisions and to move forward without your review? Without you looking over their shoulder, the opposite of empowerment is micromanagement. Now within my own team, I love to be able to just set a direction for them to be able to tell them, this is the kind of project that we’re working on. This is the goal and let them fill in the pieces, let them give them ownership of how the work gets done, what order it gets done, and all of the details around it. I just want to set a direction for them. And you as a leader, when you set direction, and you have people completely bought in, they’re taking ownership, they will figure out the process. And they will also own the goal, too. And that really is a big part of this. So empowerment is a critical piece to your own leadership.
[4:43]
The third piece is the value. Now value comes in two forms. Do they feel valued by you in the organization? Is the work they’re doing valuable? If it’s, you know, commoditize or it’s, you know, someone else can do it. They don’t feel that sense. have ownership, they don’t feel special in this. And I’m not talking about a special snowflake kind of way, but really feel special and connected to the mission of the business. The other side of value is, do they feel an increase in their own value? I believe that organizations that think about how do we increase the skill set of employees, those employees feel valued. They feel like they’re getting experience that allows them to get more money down the road. Now doesn’t mean they want to leave, it means they want to keep coming. They want to keep leaning into the work because they’re growing, expanding.
[5:37]
And your job as a leader is to increase that sense of value, both on the personal side, the way they feel about themselves, but also their skill set. If you actually do that, all of these things together, you will increase that sense of ownership across the organization. You can do this without financial tools, and it costs no money to do it. But you must make a commitment To inspire your employees to feel safe, to be empowered, and to increase their own value every step of the way.
[6:09]
My name is Gene Hammett. I work with founders, CEOs and their teams to help them understand growth to help them go beyond what they believe is possible. I love what I do. And I’d love to share with you more tips. So make sure you subscribe to this. If you’re on YouTube, make sure you hit that bell button and hit the LIKE, SHARE it with someone, all of the things that you know that you could do without spending any money to appreciate the work that’s happening here. You can also subscribe to the podcast Growth Think Tank. If you like podcasts, make sure you tune in. We do two interviews every week. And we do an episode just like this behind the scenes every week. So if you want to inspire your employees, you’ve got three strategic moves that you can make that will help you be a more effective leader. And really create a framework for success inside the organization where people go Beyond responsibility to take ownership. My name is Gene Hammett, as always lead with courage. We’ll see you next time.
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
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