Greenlight Guru Leadership & Management

What are the best practices for cultivating ownership on your team?

Our approach to cultivating ownership is built on the way we communicate, the way we think and the way we share progress. 

We prefer to communicate via intent. Leaders communicate their intentions for what we want to happen and why as opposed to dictating the actions. Team members communicate what actions they intend to take to leaders in order to create room for additional information to be provided that may alter their approach. 

Our leaders encourage a growth mindset and maintain a psychologically safe environment. The growth mindset is essential for embracing challenge and self-motivation. An environment of psychological safety is essential for taking risks, challenging the status quo and learning from mistakes. 

The final practice encourages team members to take accountability for defining, tracking and presenting the metrics associated with their objectives. They work with leaders to define objectives in terms of customer outcomes and business impacts as opposed to activity status or raw outputs. Team members and leaders collaborate to find metrics that they can control and are predictive of the desired outcome. Once defined, the team members build their own dashboards and present their metrics in our biweekly town hall meetings to share progress and maintain accountability with their stakeholders. 

When you can take responsibility in your conversations, in your head and in front of your stakeholders then you can own your outcomes.

How has ownership positively impacted their work?

The first benefit to this approach comes in the form of alignment. The teams hear a consistent message on what is the desired state and why that state is desired. The second benefit is autonomy. Our software engineers have the freedom to choose how they would implement a solution. When you can drive high alignment and grant high autonomy you get higher levels of engagement from the team members. They take more responsibility in formulating the approach and pride in the results. This is a positive feedback loop that leads to deeper personal growth and continuous improvement. We get better at setting objectives and better at achieving them each time around.

The advice you would give to other engineering leaders interested in fostering ownership?

Conversations are more important than plans. Leaders must step away from the Gantt chart and focus on communicating their intent in terms of the what and the why. Is it clear enough? Is it complete enough? Is it simple enough? Avoid over-specifying the details of how to make it happen, which can be especially challenging for leaders with significant engineering experience.

Push authority to information, not information to authority. Leaders should practice yielding control of the decision making to those closest to the decision. Discourage teams from pushing information up the chain of the command and asking for a decision or wanting to change a plan. Instead, encourage them to ask for additional context when they are stuck and share their intentions when they want to make a change. Making decisions is critical to learning and building accountability for the decision.

Mind the environment and keep it safe. Leaders should actively be seeking to remove stress and cognitive overhead from the operating environment. When you give folks the freedom of action and the responsibility for outcomes there are inevitably going to be learning opportunities. Learning and adjusting to failure are part of learning to take ownership.

It’s a process, just to get started. Leaders may see two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress with their teams. They may get stuck. Just keep going. Find ways to celebrate the wins and the learnings together in a group setting. Recognize and reward those that demonstrate the ownership approach.