Ownership is a concept that is often difficult to engrain in employees, particularly junior or newer employees. It’s easy for employees to catch a case of not-my-jobism when they haven’t been taught the importance of ownership. This is a problem in any business environment, but it can be particularly damaging when it impacts customers.
For example:
- An employee on the night shift leaves a large mess for the next shift to clean up because his shift is over, and he wants to go home. As a result, some customers arrive to find a messy place of business.
- A team of four employees fails to submit a final report to a customer by the committed deadline because they all assumed someone else on the team should be responsible for it.
- A project manager is late providing a finished product to a customer because, “procurement took too long to source the inputs I needed.”
These are all examples of a lack of ownership that are all too common in many workplaces. The last example is particularly troublesome because it doubles the negative image of the company. Not only did the project manager fail to deliver, but it also seems that there are issues with the procurement department.
Encouraging an Ownership Mentality
As Micah Solomon writes in a piece for Forbes, “When something goes wrong, don’t make your company look even worse by rolling around in the muck.”
“Ownership” is more than avoiding any one of the examples above, and it would be difficult to come up with a complete list of behaviors that constitute ownership. Instead, it’s an idea and a mind-set: “I own the results of this.” It isn’t even necessary that an employee be the person assigned the formal responsibility for a given task or project. All employees should be encouraged to take ownership when dealing with customers.