Ownership Vision to Employee-Owner–Driven Execution

A Roadmap for Committees to Facilitate Ownership Thinking and Behavior

A manager once asked me to complete a fairly large and complicated project without any guidance or direction on important tools to use, nor any tips on how to solve fairly common problems.

The manager also did not take any time to teach me how to do things I had never done before or communicate the goals and purpose behind each stage of the project. I remember describing the experience to a friend this way: “It was like learning to become a baker, but instead of teaching me how to bake a cake, I was given an example of a finished, fully baked cake without direction on the ingredients I need or which appliances to use; I wasn’t even told what temperate to set the oven at or how long I should bake it.” When I finished the project, it was riddled with mistakes. Some of the mistakes meant I had to do stages of the project all over again from scratch. The worst part? The manager said my work was sloppy and disappointing.

If the manager felt disappointed, imagine how I felt. The truth is, mine is sadly a common experience for many teams I’ve worked with that are tasked with lofty initiatives they have no experience with. I have seen mission statements that essentially read like this: “Create an ownership culture at our company” or “Get everyone to think and act like owners.” Do we want to accomplish those goals? Of course we do, but if the vision for change in your workplace is described without a sense of how to effectively execute, your committees and teams may be dealing with a baking instructor who puts a finished cake in front of you and says, “Figure it out.”

If enthusiasm or hyper-focus on the goal overrules planning, there are likely pitfalls on your horizon. The behavior change we are trying to accomplish within our organizations often follows process, or a well-designed roadmap that gets us to our destination smoothly. The following is a simple and straightforward way for employee-owned teams or communication committees to engage a process that leads to a change in behavior more reflective of ownership thinking.

Stage 1:

Define the goal or change what you want to achieve

For most committees, the fundamental goal is to help educate fellow employees on the benefit and mechanics of the ESOP, but that does not fully explain the overall vision. For almost every leader I’ve encountered, the goal is to encourage “ownership thinking,” and for the employee community at large, the “why” is to improve the financial security of all the individuals and employee-owners working at the company. The key thing here to highlight and acknowledge as a group is that we are going to need the help of all employees if we mean to effectively stick the landing, and that is where the process and work come into play.

Stage 2:

Create line-of-sight between ownership and the individual

To get employee-owners to buy in to our vision, they will need to desire achieving our goal of improving workers’ financial security just as much as we do, so we will lead them to the water and let them decide if they are thirsty for increasing their wealth or not. Employees need to understand first and foremost what is in it for them. Creating line-of-sight between the ESOP’s increasing value and their own financial success in the long term is the committee’s first step in the process of creating an ownership culture: Create an educational process that helps employees understand all the mechanics of the ESOP at your business and how it benefits them financially in the long run.

Stage 3:

Tie your ownership vision to business performance

In stage three, business literacy is necessary to make sense of the behavioral change we are asking from employees. Provide employees with the tools to understand not just that business performance directly informs the value of the ESOP but specifically how the business makes money and what they can do to involve themselves in the process. Once people understand how to read financial statements in such a way that they see their team’s influence on the bottom line, while understanding how all this connects back to the ESOP and their own financial security, they’ll start asking to how to help. Which brings us to our last step.

Stage 4:

Create systems that encourage ownership behavior

A team with just “ownership culture” as the objective will embark on baking the proverbial cake without a recipe. Behavior tends to follow process, and since clarity of process has been so helpful to your team on the ownership understanding and thinking front, the final bullet point on your committee’s mission statement should be dedicated to providing employees with a similarly clear guide on how to be more involved in generating and executing on ideas that improve company and ESOP performance.

Changing an organization’s culture and behaviors might seem like an overwhelming task at first, but that feeling of being overwhelmed is often a result of doing way too much at once, or of lack of planning on to get there. Communicating this action plan will allow your group to focus their efforts in stages, build a rhythm, and continue to add or make adjustments long term.