Podcast Episode 108 Transcript: Why Your Employees Avoid Ownership And How To Fix It

Why employees avoid ownership at work, and how leaders can build accountability, initiative, and a high-trust team culture.

Introduction: Why Employees Avoid Ownership

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Self-Reliant Team. My name is Shane Jacobs, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.

I've spent 30 years plus trying to get horses and human beings to do what I want and failing miserably most of the time, so that you don't have to spend all that time figuring it out. I've got some solutions that you're going to want to know about that you can implement that make a difference in the results that you're going to get in your lifetime and at work, today talking about why your employees avoid ownership and how to fix it.

So we're talking about ownership, accountability, and responsibility and why people aren't doing it. Okay.

The Problem with Telling People to “Take Ownership”

Most of the time, we just say, “Hey, I need you to be responsible, take ownership of this.” It doesn't work.

I want to be clear that I'm talking about, I'm going to use all those terms interchangeably: ownership, responsibility, and accountability.

Usually, we say, “Okay, we need you to be accountable. Here's some extreme ownership ideas, and we need you to be in charge because that empowers you to have more control.” And we give them all this logic and this and that and the other of why it's a good idea. We need human beings to have personal responsibility in the workplace, and then they don't. It doesn't work.

What we see, what it looks like in the workplace, what I'm talking about, how we know, what we see is irresponsibility is people staying quiet, people doing nothing, taking inaction. Okay, they just shut down, tune out, and don't take action. They don't take the initiative. They see something that may, they may recognize a problem, but they don't do anything about it. Just like, well, why don't you have this? You just look to me like you have no initiative. Okay.

It looks like blame. It looks like a whole bunch of reasons, you know, that sound like a lot of blaming and a lot of excuses. That's what your reasons sound like. Okay. You're just blaming everybody else.

One of the, some of the language I hear a lot is, is, “Well, I was told, well, when they trained me.” You know, I hear that stuff like that a lot. That's the language of irresponsibility.

Well, what are you saying? Think about what that means. “Well, when I was trained, well, what I was told, well, I was told…” Okay, so that's what that means is, is what we're saying when we say that is somebody else told me to do it this way. So therefore, the reason that I did it the wrong way has nothing to do with me. Go talk to somebody else. It's not, it's totally irresponsible.

Irresponsibility or lack of accountability is waiting to be told, you know, just like waiting to be told what to do.

What Irresponsibility Really Looks Like at Work

It also looks like I don't care. It looks like, you know, we try to figure out as leaders and managers, like, “Why the hell aren't you doing. How could you not do that? How did you not see that? There's no way you could even give a, you just don't care about this. Any of it, you don't care.” Okay.

But really it may look like that, and we may think that, but we're not recognizing the real problem. Okay.

What Ownership and Responsibility Actually Mean

The real problem in ownership and responsibility, okay? It means, well, first of all, let's just talk about what it means. It means that I own this, okay? It's mine. I am accountable for the outcome, okay?

In personal framing, this is a skill that can be developed. We can learn how that we, because, you know, ultimately we are responsible. We can blame everybody else, and it feels pretty good in the moment for all of our stuff. We can blame people for how we feel. We can blame people for our outcomes. We can blame people. In that instant, it feels pretty good.

But what it does is it shuts us down, and it blocks us from being able to make progress.

When people first realize, and I see this a lot with emotional responsibility. In other words, when people see, let's say for example, that you have, you get the awareness. It finally makes sense to you like, “I've been feeling bad this whole time and I thought it was somebody else's fault, but it was all me?”

And it feels like, it feels, it can feel bad. It's like, “My gosh, the whole time it was my fault the whole time.”

Responsibility is not blame. Okay. That doesn't mean that you're accepting. It doesn't, doesn't have anything to do with blame. But it can feel overwhelming, and it can feel like blame when you first... it can feel bad if you frame it that way.

So the truth is that it's power. You can also look at it when you have those realizations like, I've been feeling bad but I'm the one that's in control of that. It's like, “Yes, there's a way out!”

You know, now I've been empowered to be able to have the ability to step out of it, move forward, and feel better. That's the way, you know, that's the way out of feeling stuck, feeling trapped, feeling a lack of progress and all of that is through personal responsibility.

Instead, we can be opposite of just staying stuck and not being able to move forward.

The Real Reason People Avoid Ownership

So here's what in the workplace, like I said, no initiative, no recommendations, blaming others, excuses. “Well, I was told, well, that's above my pay grade.” You know, just doing the minimum, not caring.

So managers look at this and they think that people don't care. And that's the real reason, is the real reason people don't do it, don't do what you ask them to do is not necessarily what we, what you might see as a leader.

The real reason is, and we do it the same as anybody else does it too. The real reason is, is if I take ownership, if I make a decision, if I speak up and somebody else doesn't like it, I'm gonna feel judged. Or if I do it wrong, I'm afraid to act out because somebody might make that mean something about me.

Really, I might make that mean something about me, so I'm not gonna do anything. I wanna stay in the safe spot where I'm fine right now, but that's a risk to be able to jump out there, take ownership of it, because if it fails I might look bad or you might, you know, I'm gonna feel judged. You might think I'm wrong, okay?

I'm not gonna do anything because you're gonna think I'm wrong or you're gonna think I made a bad decision. You're gonna think I'm the problem, okay?

And so we don't want people to think that about us. We want us to be okay all the time. So we're just like in protect mode, okay? So what we do is nothing, and then we call that irresponsibility.

The Root Cause: A Feeling Problem, Not a Work Problem

And you have to remember that the only reason that human beings do anything or don't do anything, period, everything that we do or don't do is because of how we feel. Okay. It is because of how we feel. So this isn't really a work problem. It's a feeling problem. Okay.

So most, most leaders, when we recognize the irresponsibility, when we recognize a lack of ownership, we say, you know, be accountable. Take ownership, step up, you know, and it sounds good, but it doesn't feel good because we haven't addressed what's driving the foundation at what's driving the root of the irresponsibility in the first place. Okay.

The Solution: Create an Environment That Drives Ownership

So that's what I'm here to show you how this actually works, how to get the results you want and how to get people so that they want to take ownership, because it can be, because it's a positive for everyone. Okay. If you see it and you understand it. So you can take this into your business and you can fix it. Okay.

So the core principle comes back to The Worth Work Principle. Okay. And what you do is you can, I've talked about this recently on this podcast, there's a couple of things that you can do.

And I talk about creating an environment where people are not judged as a person. Okay. That safe zone, this environment that I'm talking about, and how do you create the environment? That's one thing that we can do.

Judge the Work, Protect the Person

Okay, where we judge the work, we judge the work and we protect the person. We judge the work and we protect the person. We always protect the person. Okay.

So we can set up an environment where people don't feel judged. That's the key here. When people know that they're not gonna be judged individually, their person, it's not gonna mean something about who they are or what they are, we're just gonna look at the work, the trust goes up.

Okay, because here's the thing. We're not going to be able to control how they feel. Okay.

But you can provide and create, you can create an environment, a space, a way of doing things, rules, a set of a system of how we do things here. And the way that we do things here is we protect the person, we judge the work, protect the person. This is a safe zone. Okay. This is a place where you can bring ideas. Okay. Where you can make mistakes, where you can do it wrong if you have the authority, you can be corrected, can learn, you can take instruction, you can take critique, you can take correction, where you can bring recommendations.

What Ownership Looks Like in Action

I mean, how would it be if people who didn't know what the answer was looked at the problem at hand and said, “Man, I've never been trained on this. I have no idea what to do with this thing, but I'm the one that's closest to it. And it seems like I could do this and this would be a good solution. I'm going to take my solution and I'm going to go present it.”

“Hey,” I came up and get to my manager, my leader, “Hey, I just came up against this thing. Here's what I got. I've analyzed it to the best of my ability. And this looks like the best course of action. Should I, can I take this action? What, help me out here.”

Why Employees Don’t Bring Recommendations

Now, here's the key, why do people not do that? We want them to do that. Bring a recommendation, what do you think? You're the one that's in the middle of it.

Why don't they do it? Why don't they bring a recommendation? Why do they either guess and go around it or do nothing? Do nothing, just stop.

And then we think that they don't care or they just don't have initiative or they don't have an innovative idea inside you, or you failed to bring me recommendations and I've asked you a thousand times why, because either we tell them that they're the recommendation, we're not going to use the recommendation.

They get their feelings hurt. They feel judged because they brought you something that you're not going to use or even when, and that's even sometimes when you're not trying to be judge panel or we critique it to the point where they also feel judged and they don't want to feel bad. So they just shut up and do nothing. Okay.

Creating a Safe Environment for Ownership

And so we, we, we create the environment where it's a safe space where people know that we're not going to judge them. And that is the key. They need to understand that. And one of the ways that they understand that and believe it and the trust starts to go up was, of course, it starts with ourselves like anything else.

We set the standard and this is a new standard. This isn't just a good idea. “Hey, try and go on about it like this and maybe you'll have a good, you know, a little bit better result.” Or, “You will have a better result, and this isn't a great idea.” This is a fundamental shift in the way people think.

Most people have never even thought about separating what they do from who they are. We go through our whole damn lives trying to prove that we're good enough, that we're valuable enough, that we're acceptable to ourselves and the rest of the world, and we spend all, goodness, that energy that we spend where if we could have the shift, the idea, and firmly believe and internalize the belief that nothing can touch our perfect worth.

Nothing, nothing that we can do, no matter why we did it or didn't do it, or if it was a mistake, or if it was on purpose, or it was a bad decision, or we just were off our game, it doesn't even matter. What we do has no impact on our worth, our value as a human being, as a soul on this planet. Nothing that we can do and nothing that can be done to us and no circumstances are ever going to change that.

You internalize that. You model that. And that's the second thing we also talked about on this podcast.

You model that as a leader and you provide that environment where nothing in this place we regard people and we don't judge the work. Guess what you've done?

Modeling the Standard as a Leader

You've opened the door, you have modeled it and you've created the environment, the space. You've given people the space to flourish, to take a hold of that because they want to. They want to excel. We can do a better job of letting them know it.

People take responsibility. They can speak up, they can lead. And people feel it. They see it when we model it and they feel it. Okay.

Establishing a Culture: Judge the Work, Protect the Person

And we come up with rules like this is how we do things here. Okay, we do not judge people here. We judge the work. We protect the person. We talk about it. We train it. We repeat it. We model it. And that's the way we roll.

And when people, like I like to say, buy into this idea, what I mean by that is they accept it as true and they accept the belief that that's the way that we're all equal here. We're all equally invaluable, equal. No one better or different in the work we do is different, but our value is not.

We are unique and individual and oh so different, but none of our value is a difference. I am not one more or 1% less than any other human being and no one is 1% more or less than me.

Why It Becomes Safe to Take Ownership

If we all know that, and we all know that it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to be wrong, that's the big thing. And that's okay. It's not okay to be wrong on purpose all the time.

When we recognize that this doesn't affect our value, we do it less. We're right more of the time because we can objectively look at our work. We're busy making excuses and blaming everybody else for all the things that we did wrong.

When it becomes okay, it doesn't affect our value. We can look at our work and say, wow, yeah, I did that. And it's wrong. I don't like the idea of doing it that way because it's not helping our goals here at this company. It's not helping us get the things that we're here to do done.

So I want to change that. And that doesn't mean that I suck. It does not mean that I suck as a human. And when I believe that, then when I believe that that's the way we roll here, I can take an objective look and I can make the change and I can move this company forward.

People spring up, they bring ideas, they take initiative, they take feedback, they take correction, they improve faster. And taking ownership becomes like a natural normal thing. It's not forced. You don't have to be going around trying to force it because it just becomes so much easier to do.

Why Most People Still Avoid Ownership

Even in a bad environment, people still make the choice. They have to make, they get the choice of whether they take ownership or not.

But most people, but most people, people won't choose it if it feels bad if they think that it's gonna feel bad to do it They won't do it.

The Cost of Lack of Ownership in the Workplace

So the the lack of ownership, okay the lack of responsibility that employees have at work this cost us so much time and productivity and it slows down or kills our momentum and it's happening every day in our company, you know that

I, I saw this so clearly in my own company, I would observe irresponsibility. And like I said, one of the things that I used to hear the most was, well, well, I was told, this and that, I used to hear that all the time.

And I wonder, like, you saw that and you didn't do anything. I'm like, how? I couldn't even understand how on earth could you have saw what you saw and done nothing. Right?

And as I began to understand human beings more, I realized they saw it. They just didn't do anything about it because it was too risky to their emotional well-being, really, is what it comes down to.

Building a High-Trust, Self-Reliant Team

So as we have developed and I have developed a number of environments or cultures or workplaces or whatever, help people come up with rules and rules, systems, how we do things, right? This is the way we roll.

The places where they work on this. And this is not something that you just, you know, that you just enforce or lay down the law or you just, it gets done and then it's over. This is something that you endeavor that you work on. It's a pursuit. It's something that you work on ongoing to maintain the quality of this relationship that we have, because that's what we're doing.

We are creating a high-trust environment and that gives people the perfect opportunity to take responsibility and excel and quit being a drain on the payroll. Okay? And this is, that's what it looks like in the workplace.

Call to Action: Build a Self-Reliant Team

So if you want to come, if you want a team, if you want a company, if you want a team in your company, if you want people to take ownership, if you want a team that's more accountable and requires less management, have a free resource that's called the Self-Reliant Team.

You can sign up at shanejacob.com.

I also speak and train organizations on this work, The Worth Work System. Judge the work, Protect the Person.

And you can find out more at shanejacob.com. I appreciate you taking your time to be here with me today and remember, your value is non-negotiable. See you soon.

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