Three Essential Leadership Practices that Improve Team Ownership - Practice 1

Written by Pollyanna Pixton,

Why is team ownership important? It is essential to agile team success because individuals thrive on ownership. With ownership, you have a stake in the game and push to find the best solution. It is yours.

The difficulty is that most corporate cultures have command-and-control leaders--leaders who not only tell teams what to do, but how to do it. Telling them how takes away ownership. Without ownership, productivity is low. In one company I assessed, it was as low as 20%. Most often I see productivity of around 50%. Still, that’s a real waste of talent!

As a leader, you can’t “give” ownership to teams and individuals. They have to take it. And many people don’t know how to do that. They are frightened of failure and making a mistake that could result in humiliation, demotion or worse, losing their job. There is a lot of fear. And leaders can help.

Practice 1: Don’t Give Answers!

One of the members of your team comes into your office. “I can’t solve this!” You, as the leader, answer: “Have you tried this….?” You just provided the answer. Now, who has ownership for the solution? You do.

How do you avoid taking away ownership from your team? Don’t give any answers! Just ask questions. I always ask, “How do you want to solve it?” or “What options have you tried?” I also ask people to talk about the pathway they went down and why they chose that path. Sounds simple--but team leads find it difficult to do. We came up through the ranks solving problems. Now, in our leadership roles, we have to help other people solve the problem.

Besides not giving answers, do not correct mistakes. Tony Dungy, the NFL coach, would never correct or yell at his players when they did something wrong on the field. Later, he would ask them what they saw out there to make them do what they did. That way, he could learn and better prepare his players in the future and his players could reflect on how to improve outside of the pressure of the immediate situation.

The more this writer talks to people about their PMOs, the more apparent it becomes that organizations frequently don’t know what to do with them--and he's not sure why that's a problem. Why do so many PMO “problem children” exist?