Ownership is a Choice: Building a Culture of Accountability
/I don’t worry about mistakes in an organization, I worry about "collective numbness”—the tendency for people to blindly go through their day without questioning their actions or taking responsibility for their outcomes.
An ownership mentality replaces passiveness with accountability and urgency. It’s the antidote to a victim mentality. Don't just preach ownership—give it. Here are 15 ideas to create owners in your organization.
1. Shared responsibility is no responsibility. When everyone owns something, no one does. Teams need owners—not to work alone, but to make sure someone answers when things go wrong. Blame isn’t the goal, it’s accountability.
2. Hire drivers, not passengers. CEO Frank Slootman recommends hiring drivers, not passengers. Drivers act with urgency and without being told. Passengers wait for directions and then follow along. Part of what makes Toyota’s manufacturing so successful is the act of giving line workers ownership and responsibility for a product’s quality, enabling them to suggest changes and raise concerns, not just going along for the ride.
3. Freedom and Autonomy Creates Ownership. Freedom is the path to accountability, not the opposite. As Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings notes, “Giving employees more freedom led them to take more ownership and behave more responsibly…Freedom is not the opposite of accountability. Instead, it is a path toward it.”
4. Designate a Lollipop Man. In his book Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, Shane Snow shares an example from Ferrari: In Ferrari’s high-stakes pit crews, one person—the "Lollipop Man"—oversees the entire operation. While the crew is deep in the weeds, the Lollipop Man acts as the conductor, seeing the big picture and ensuring cohesion. For every team effort, appoint one person to "own" the operation. The individuals own their tasks. The Lollipop man owns the system.
5. Ownership demands personal accountability. Ownership changes how you see failure. When something goes wrong, most people blame external factors: their boss, the market, or bad luck. Owners take internal responsibility and figure out what they could have done better.
6. Owners question the process. Don’t blindly follow accepted rules and guidelines, but don’t arbitrarily break them either. Constantly question if a process should be changed or discarded all together. Reality changes too fast for any process or rule to be set in stone.
7. Owners decide under ambiguity. Ambiguity delays decisions as teams wait for more clarity. Realize that after a certain level of effort and research, the cost of waiting exceeds the value of more work. A good decision today is almost always better than a "perfect" decision that never arrives.
8. Owners acknowledge mistakes. Mistakes are how you get better. That means admitting, sharing, and learning from mistakes, not covering them up.
9. Kill the “We” and the “They”. Vague language is the primary enemy of accountability. In his book The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, Tom Kelley highlights the design firm IDEO, where employees are forbidden from blaming a nebulous "they" for problems—if a coffeemaker is broken, you don't say "they" should fix it; you find a specific person to take charge. Organizations often hide behind "we" (e.g., "We need to be more innovative"), but "we" isn’t a person. Replace collective pronouns with actual people.
10. Owners make specific plans. Once you’ve replaced the “they” with specific people, you need to take specific action. In the book Crucial Confrontations, the authors note that we can’t hold people accountable to do “something, sometime, somehow.” We need specific action, not vague plans. Owners insist individuals know what they should be doing and when it should be done.
11. Avoid the consensus trap. When no one owns a decision, groups start to gravitate to popular, safe, and conventional ideas. Owners snap them out of this tendency, by pushing back when groups start down the comfortable consensus path.
12. Hunt for the dead whale. In his book Awaken Your Genius, author Ozan Varol recounts the example of film director Mike Nichols. Mike would actively seek dissent by asking his crew, "What’s the dead whale?"—referring to the one thing stinking up the room that nobody wants to talk about. Owners aren’t hesitant to find the ugly truths no one wants to mention.
13. Owners raise the standards. Excellence is not a static state; it is constant correction. Restaurateur Danny Meyer uses "The Saltshaker Theory": if a saltshaker belongs in the center of the table, the chaos of the day will inevitably move it. An owner doesn't get frustrated; they simply move it back. Gently but relentlessly reinforce the standards of excellence by "moving the saltshaker" back to the center every time it drifts.
14. Leaders can’t do it all. I’ve worked with obsessive, controlling bosses who try to do it all and hamstring the company’s ability to get things done. A single leader cannot do everything. Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL, advocates for "decentralized command," where leaders at every level are empowered to make decisions.
15. You can’t preach ownership. Have you ever had a manager talk about autonomy or independence and then undermine every one of your decisions? You can’t promote an ownership mentality and then micromanage your team’s decisions. Action, not words, are what matters.