On Ownership
Ownership is the intersection of Responsibility and Authority.
Responsibility is all about output, outcomes, and results. It governs what happens when a certain result occurs: what happens when this succeeds or fails? Who is on the hook and who gets promoted? Who, and ultimately what, decides whether something is acceptable, having problems, or is a Code Red?
If you are responsible, it is up to you to alert the team when something isn’t going as planned. It is not up to that individual to rearrange priorities or fix the problem immediately themselves.
Authority is about inputs and priorities. Who is assigned to what? What is the critical path? How are we allocating resources in terms of time, money, cost, and energy? Is this a team problem or an individual problem?
Authority gives an individual the ability to adjust these inputs in order to guide a result. It does not govern what the final result will be, or what happens because of it, but it does reflect what goes into a decision.
In order to reflect Ownership, an individual needs both.
Authority without Responsibility leads to power-mongering, scapegoating and poor decisions regarding resource allocation. If you are not ultimately affected by a decision (or immediately suffering the consequences such as late nights or extra work), and have the power to push it into being, it will inevitably be abused and breed resentment. This leads to broken trust and difficult relationships. It can be overcome by empathy and communication, but requires diligence and unity.
Responsibility without Authority leads to Deer-in-the-Headlights, unfair trials, and the inability to affect the outcomes an individual is ultimately measured by. If you are measured by a particular outcome and can’t control the knobs that lead to affecting that outcome, it becomes frustrating and isolating. It isn’t possible to defend your decisions or explain away results. In some cases, it can also lead to positive results that aren’t deserved, inevitably breeding overconfidence and resentment. This can be overcome by recruiting resources to your cause through persuasion, but requires charisma and trust.
Ownership is what happens when control over inputs is matched with consequences of results. It is a by-product of skin in the game. If one takes ownership for something, they are putting themselves at risk of adverse outcomes with the understanding that they have the power to control (some) inputs. Though results may ultimately depend on inputs outside of their control (externalities, such as market forces, natural disasters, etc.), an owner is ultimately responsible regardless. In order to prompt higher responsibility, or encourage others to take more responsibility, offering the balance of authority is important.
One of the reasons CEOs (typically) have so much authority is because they must be responsible for overall performance of a company, for which many factors are outside their control. If the supply chain team accidentally leaks the vendor list, or the engineering team fails to pass certification, or the marketing team misreads the demand of customers: the company can experience losses, and the CEO is ultimately held responsible. In order to counteract these external factors, the CEO is entrusted with (near ultimate) authority over all aspects of the company. They can adjust any input they feel is relevant.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Ultimately, Ownership is captured by two factors Paul Graham discusses in his essay How to Make Wealth: Leverage and Measurement. If you have Responsibility, you must have clear Measurement: How do you know if you succeed or fail? How are you rewarded for your efforts? If you have Authority, you must have Leverage: Do your decisions matter? Do they change the course or affect the outcome?
Leverage and Authority, and Responsibility and Measurement, are not synonymous, but they are cousins. If you are measured by a particular metric, in many ways, you are responsible for it. If you have leverage over an input, you have authority.
Skin in the Game is a mechanism to balance Responsibility and Authority. If you have Skin in the Game, you have consequences (direct and indirect) to compensate for your decisions. One with Skin in the Game receives the outcome according to their inputs, good or bad.
The best mechanism I know of, to encourage Ownership in an organization, is to match Responsibility with Authority. If someone has Authority, they must ultimately be Responsible for the aspects they have control over: Measurement with Leverage. If someone has Responsibility, they must ultimately have the Authority to control the outcome by adjusting inputs: Leverage with Measurement.
Perhaps the bigger organizational challenge when it comes to Ownership, is deciding who has Ownership over what. If a project has 2 owners, what does that actually mean? In a practical sense, confusion. It is usually up to management to decide where each project owner’s domain lies, and where to build fences between projects.
The best technique I have found is to be overly explicit in defining boundaries when it comes to project ownership, whether you are a manager, a project leader, or a team member. Outlining that Sue, the infrastructure engineer, has ownership up until the data is passed from the back-end, and that Jerry, the front-end lead, has ownership from that point until the customer is satisfied with the app, ultimately prevents conflicts or items being dropped. Both Sue and Jerry can move independently and with confidence understanding where the fence is.
As Robert Frost wrote, good fences make good neighbors.
Don’t leave a no-person’s land between countries. That’s where projects (and ultimately, organizations) go to die.
But it’s worth noting that overlap can be equally frustrating. When Project Manager A tells the team that XYZ is the most important task, and then Project Manager B gets angry that no one has hit their timeline, confusion, frustration and tensions arise. There’s nothing wrong with re-drawing the boundaries, just be sure everyone knows which side they fall on.
A tight measurement system to provide feedback, and clear leverage to affect outcomes, will do more to promote Ownership than a Mission statement or a company memo. Clear boundaries on who owns what will help empower and parallelize. Ownership is the prerequisite for higher skills, like Initiative, Integrity, Quality, and Customer Service; these things we claim our organizations care so much about.
If you want a company of owners, build a company of responsible authorities.
Thanks for reading!
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