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Reinvent Your Organizational Culture to Drive Transformative Results Through Your People

The key lies with empowering your people through ownership in their work

Reinvent Your Organizational Culture to Drive Transformative Results Through Your People

The key lies with empowering your people through ownership in their work

Empowering associate ownership drives everything else. With an empowered team, you have a team that cares beyond basic “employee” care for their work. There is another level that not every team or individual maintains. A notch up to a level of ownership and a strive for excellence where proactivity, accountability, deep care for outcomes, and an inherit responsibility are rooted in the associate's work. Here are a few benefits of an empowered team working with an ownership mentality:

A team that cares, accomplishes more
Retention increases with the level of ownership
Care beyond compensation - missionary not mercenary
Performance and productivity
Innovation thrives

Empowered ownership leads, drives, and incentivizes not only the best fit behaviors for your business, but leads to outcomes through work aligned to the mission. In short, you have your employees working in the right way for your business, with the right mindset, all focused on driving the desired results. Sounds simple? It may be more rare than we would expect.

Hiring for Empowerment

If you want great empowered associate and team performance, consider looking for the characteristics in people you hire:

Hold the desire and drive for success
Looking for responsibility
Ownership in what they say and what they do
Proof of accountability in their life and career
Ability to learn and apply
Pride and care in their own education or previous work experience
Genuine care and interest in the work and other people
Provide signs of interest in being a teammate, not an individual
Show up on time
Self-awareness

Incentives

Incentives often drive ownership, yet don’t align with the culture that leadership is hoping to drive. Companies may offer an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan), preferred stock, performance bonuses, merit increases, etc., but then don’t link the work with their incentives for their people. There essentially is a work-incentive gap, where both exist, but they don’t coincide to actually support each other. They are siloed. Consider creating incentives aligned to what you will allow your people to impact - why provide a bonus, if an individual can truly not impact the metric or it doesn’t actually incentivize any tangible action? And if an overall company or group incentive bonus, exude transparency up front on the target to hit that incentive, to actually incentivize the work and results.

Strong alignment, often correlates to strong incentives where outside factors aren't overly powerful. Providing a bonus that someone feels no way to impact and feels completely out of their control, actually provides little value, maybe as low as 25% of what you are compensating for when you consider the dilemma, and in some cases could be demotivating when you look at the psychological side of your compensation plan being tied to goals you really have little to no control over. This impacts the strength of the incentive, but also the interest working to achieve the target.

Level of Power, Aligns with Level of Output

The more power and responsibility you give to your people the more empowered they are to lead, run, operate and own, and be your business. One approach I have seen work tremendously well, is really pushing your people to step-up into their roles, and start leveling-up to that next role where it applies. This is not just a form of intentional delegation and empowerment, rather a push towards ownership in the actual business leadership. Bring each team member up to allow for them to work to their potential, elevate to the next level potentially, and beyond:

Your people will surprise you positively, if you let them. They can often do more than you allow them to do.
Build your business so you don’t have to be there for it to survive.
Empowering your team and elevating them to the level they should be and what the business needs, drives a level of ownership you won't experience otherwise.
For the highest leader on the team to help elevate your team individuals and org, they must have time and autonomy to build and think beyond day-to-day ops, and thankfully that’s what your team is meant to run, and own.

Addition by Subtraction: Building by Not Doing

How do you build a Performance Operations Culture centered with associate empowerment? It starts with letting go:

Control
False pressure or urgency
Distractions
Intimidation or threatening style
Busy work adding little to no value
Reports, attendance, meetings, recurring responsibilities --> if they serve little to no value
Babysitting or micro-management
In office work to serve leadership’s lack of self-assurance or prop up their insecurities

I see it in the classroom with my children, or hear about it with my wife's classroom. Something revolutionary, groundbreaking, and frankly far too rare; treating people as an adult. No, it's not rocket science, but we often make it this way, by going the opposite direction with our management tactics. Or in the case of children, treating them appropriately for their age, with respect, with dignity, and as a partner, not as a tyrant, which fosters a collaborative and community-oriented environment, growing passion, care, and ownership for their work and joy with supporting their peers.

Is there a time and a place to get employees or children back in line, of course, and as a leader you must, but it's about setting expectations, and letting people surprise you with their ability to work within them and actually enjoy the clarity of expectations you establish. Your team wants clear expectations. I see it over and over again, associates thrive on clarity with their role, responsibilities, and expectations. The ambiguity grows uncertainty, poor confidence, and testing the system. In order to establish team member empowerment and grow a Performance Operations Culture, it requires some groundwork.

Build Blocks for Empowerment

The right people on the bus (hired or developed)
Trust
Communication
Clarity in ownership of responsibility (RACI concept)
Proactive approach
Confidence
Calmness in leadership
Alignment of culture, interest, vision, and goals
Genuine care for people, their interests, goals, and ways of working

The list goes on, but those are a few to get started. And if you’re still curious on how to make all this happen, it requires your mindset shift. It requires you to find belief in the intentions of your team and the commitment of an empowered team. You will need to believe your people know more than you, can achieve more as a unit, belief that innovation stems from freedom and productive collaboration, and that your ego is a fault, not the purpose being served. You will need to see reality, not the stories made up in your head. You may need to think differently, if you’re not there yet.

If you are currently running a kingdom, not an organization, it's going to take some work. Try taking away all directives and mandates in one swoop, and it may be eye-opening at either how your team has no idea what to do without your micro-management, how they move forward and can just run without all the nonsense, or they will think something is wrong and wonder why you have abandoned them. It will be telling how quickly the culture ch...