There is a phrase that appears in many organisations:
“Our employees don’t take ownership.”
People hesitate to make decisions. Managers escalate issues upward. Work slows down when senior leaders are unavailable. In some organisations, nothing seems to move unless the CEO is personally involved.
The natural response is often to make people more accountable.
Add KPIs.
Add daily tasks.
Add dashboards.
Introduce new tracking systems.
Run another management training programme.
Tell people that they need to “take more ownership”.
But there is a more important question to ask first:
Do we actually know that a lack of ownership is the problem?
Or are we looking at a symptom of a deeper structural issue?
An opinion is not automatically a fact
Complex organisational problems usually involve multiple departments and stakeholders.
A CEO sees the organisation from one position.
A COO sees it from another.
Managers have their own experiences.
Employees working directly inside the process see something else again.
All of these perspectives can be valuable.
But they should not automatically be treated as facts.
What people tell us is influenced by the position they occupy, the responsibilities they carry, their experience, their incentives, their exposure to risk, and sometimes their own conflicts of interest.
Much of the information we initially receive is therefore better treated as a perspective or hypothesis.
It should be heard.
But that does not mean good problem-solving consists of collecting everyone’s opinion, finding the middle ground, and designing a solution that keeps everybody happy.
In a complex organisation, such a solution may not exist.
The objective is not consensus.
The objective is to answer a more fundamental question:
What are we actually trying to solve?
Is “lack of ownership” a problem — or an interpretation?
Imagine a CEO saying:
“Our employees have no ownership. If I don’t come into the office, nothing gets done.”
The first step should not be to immediately design an “employee ownership initiative”.
The statement should first be held as a hypothesis.
From the CEO’s perspective, the evidence may appear obvious.
Employees hesitate.
Managers escalate decisions.
Small issues wait for approval.
The CEO becomes the bottleneck.
It is easy to conclude:
People are not thinking for themselves.
But speak to the employees and the picture may change.
They might say:
“I know what my responsibilities are.”
“I know what I need to get done every day. In fact, I am already overloaded.”
“What I don’t know is whether I actually have the authority to make this decision.”
Now the problem looks very different.
It may not be a motivation problem at all.
It may be a decision-authority problem.
If you expect people to make decisions, they need to know which decisions are theirs
Consider a manager who is told:
“You’re a manager. You should be able to make decisions.”
But in practice, their decisions can be overridden at any moment by the CEO or by someone more senior or experienced.
When the manager makes a bad decision, they are held responsible.
When they make a good one, the final direction may have been modified by someone above them, making their contribution difficult to connect to the result.
Over time, what does that manager learn?
They learn:
There is little value in making the decision myself.
When something carries risk, the safest behaviour becomes:
Ask the CEO first.
From the top of the organisation, this may look like a lack of ownership.
From the employee’s position, however, it can be perfectly rational self-protection.
If I make the decision myself and it goes wrong, I own the failure.
If I escalate it and the CEO makes the final call, the risk is no longer mine alone.
The organisation may therefore be teaching people not to decide independently, while leadership simultaneously asks:
“Why won’t anyone take ownership?”
Responsibility without authority does not create ownership
If an organisation wants ownership, it cannot design only for responsibility.
There needs to be a clear relationship between:
Responsibility — Authority — Accountability
People need to know:
What they are responsible for.
Which decisions they can make independently.
Which decisions need to be escalated.
What level of risk they are allowed to take.
Where their decision boundary ends.
And who owns the consequences of those decisions.
Not every decision should, of course, be decentralised.
Some decisions carry significant financial, strategic, legal, or operational risk. Those may reasonably require approval from a higher level.
But if a decision sits inside the genuine scope of someone’s role, and the organisation expects that person to own the outcome, they also need sufficient authority to influence that outcome.
Otherwise, the organisation creates:
Accountability without authority.
And accountability without authority tends to produce defensive behaviour, not ownership.
Is the problem in the workflow, the job description, or recruitment?
Once we investigate this far, the problem may not stop at workflow.
Perhaps decision boundaries are unclear because the Job Description never clearly established what the role actually owns.
Go one level deeper and we may discover that the organisation itself has not defined what it means by “Manager”.
A manager responsible for a large team of junior employees needs strong people leadership, coaching, coordination, and execution skills.
Another manager may have few or no direct reports. Their primary responsibility may be analysis, planning, judgement, decision-making, and ownership of a business outcome.
Both roles may carry the word “Manager”.
But they require very different people.
If the role is poorly designed, recruitment may then select the wrong profile.
A problem that originally appeared as:
“Employees don’t have ownership”
can therefore lead us back through:
Workflow
Decision-making structure
Role design
Job descriptions
Management structure
and even recruitment.
This is why jumping directly from a visible problem to a solution is so dangerous in organisational work.
Separate the symptom from the root cause
One of the most important parts of structural problem-solving is refusing to mistake a symptom for the problem itself.
For example:
“The CEO has to be in the office for work to move.”
“Managers don’t make decisions.”
“Everything needs approval.”
“Employees lack ownership.”
These observations tell us how the system is behaving.
They do not yet tell us why the system produces that behaviour.
If we solve the symptom directly, we might introduce more daily tasks.
Another tool.
Another approval system.
More KPIs.
More training.
Or perhaps replace the people.
These actions can create the appearance of progress while leaving the underlying mechanism untouched.
The result is often another layer of process built on top of the original structural problem.
The organisation becomes more complicated, but not necessarily more functional.
More information does not always create more clarity
There is another common assumption in organisational problem-solving:
The more people we ask, the better our decision will become.
Not necessarily.
Listening to relevant stakeholders matters.
But not every opinion in the organisation has equal relevance to every question.
If we do not know what question we are trying to answer, we can collect enormous amounts of information without having a structure for distinguishing signal from noise.
Eventually:
More opinions do not necessarily mean more information.
And:
More information does not necessarily mean more clarity.
Sometimes the additional input simply creates more noise, more hesitation, and a harder decision.
Start with the right question
When I approach a complicated organisational problem, I therefore do not begin with:
“What does everyone want?”
Nor do I begin with:
“How can we design a solution that everyone will be happy with?”
I begin with:
“What exactly are we trying to solve?”
From there, we can separate:
Fact from opinion.
Symptoms from causes.
Constraints from assumptions.
Individual behaviour from system behaviour.
And ultimately, identify the structure that keeps producing the outcome we are seeing.
Because many problems that initially look like people problems
are actually structural problems.
And if the structure is what produces the behaviour, attempting to fix the people without changing the system they operate within may never solve the real problem.
