When leaders complain that no one in the team seems willing to “just own it,” they often frame the issue as a matter of personality or motivation. They conclude that people today are less responsible, less driven, or too used to being told what to do. In reality, what looks like a mindset problem is very often a design problem. The way the work, roles, and rituals are structured quietly teaches people to stay in the middle, to help without leading, and to wait for someone else to make the final call. Ownership is not a rare character trait. It is the predictable result of a system that makes taking responsibility feel clear, safe, and worthwhile. In many young companies, the first barrier to ownership appears as blurred accountability. Early on, everyone is encouraged to “wear many hats” and “jump in wherever needed.” This sounds flexible and collaborative, but over time it erodes the link between a specific outcome and a specific person. Ask who owns onboarding and you may hear that Product handles user flows, Customer Success replies to questions, and HR manages contracts, so it is “shared.” Shared responsibility often means that three people feel they are helping, while no one feels ultimately accountable. When deadlines slip or customers have a poor experience, no one feels they have truly failed, because the work never clearly belonged to them in the first place.
This pattern often comes from good intentions. Founders do not want to create rigid silos too early. They also worry about blaming people when things are still messy. As a result, staff learn that stepping forward and declaring ownership can be risky. The person whose name is on a project is also the one who will be singled out when something goes wrong. It feels safer to contribute quietly and avoid standing at the front. In that context, people are not dodging responsibility because they are lazy. They are reading the social rules of the organisation correctly and choosing self protection over visibility.
A second barrier is the gravitational pull of the founder. Many companies are built around a strong central figure whose instincts and decisions carried the business through its earliest stages. The founder becomes the default escalation point and the hidden owner of almost every critical problem. Important customer calls, hiring decisions, product tradeoffs, and pricing questions all somehow flow back to the same person. On the surface this looks like dedication. Underneath, it trains the team to believe that real ownership sits one level higher than whatever title they currently hold. Even when a founder says, “You own this now,” their daily behaviour may contradict the message. If they still reply first in every channel, join every decision meeting, and answer late night messages faster than they respond to planned weekly updates, employees absorb a clear lesson. The most reliable way to move things forward is still to get the founder’s personal attention, not to exercise the authority of the role. Over time, ambitious people learn to wait, to ask, and to escalate rather than to decide.
A third barrier lies in how vaguely ownership is defined. Leaders often tell someone, “You are in charge of marketing,” or “You own operations,” but never specify what success actually means, which levers truly belong to that person, or where their authority stops. The new “owner” does a little bit of everything, stays busy, joins many meetings, but rarely feels confident enough to say yes or no decisively. The company measures effort through lists of completed tasks rather than by tracking whether meaningful business problems are actually resolved. Public praise goes to those who have been working late or "saving" last minute crises, not to those who quietly redesign a process so that the crisis will not recur. In that environment, true ownership, which always involves choosing tradeoffs, feels more dangerous than simply saying yes to every request. There is also the emotional weight of blame. Many employees in Southeast Asia and the Gulf have grown up in schools and workplaces where mistakes carried a heavy social cost. Even if a founder has worked hard to build a kinder culture, people carry those memories with them. When they hear “take ownership,” what they may secretly hear is “step into the spotlight where everyone will see if you fail.” The way leaders respond to problems either reinforces or loosens that fear. If each failure turns into a hunt for the individual at fault, rather than an exploration of how the system allowed that error to happen, people learn to distance themselves from ownership. If the person who admits responsibility finds their scope quietly reduced afterward, ownership starts to look like a fast route to losing influence, not gaining it.
A fifth barrier is the simple lack of information and functional process. Ownership requires context. People cannot make responsible decisions about priorities or tradeoffs if key numbers live only in the founder’s head or in a private document. If there is no straightforward mechanism for raising concerns, they wait until something is visibly broken. At that point, what you see is not proactive stewardship but frantic firefighting. Many teams also import rituals from larger organisations, such as long status meetings or complex OKR frameworks, without adapting them to their stage. These routines give an illusion of structure but leave actual decision rights muddy. People leave the meeting with more tasks, not with a clearer sense of what they truly control. If you want to dismantle these barriers, it helps to think about ownership as resting on three interlocking elements: clarity, control, and consequence. When any one of these is missing, even talented people will hesitate to own difficult problems.
Clarity means that for every important domain, there is a visible, named owner. Not a committee with shared responsibility, but one person whose name is written next to that area. Everyone should know which metrics that person is accountable for, which decisions they can make independently, and which decisions require them to consult others. This does not require long documents. It can be a one page ownership map that is shared, referenced in meetings, and updated as the company evolves. The goal is to remove the feeling that everything is vaguely everyone’s job.
Control means that the person who carries the responsibility also has the authority and resources to influence the outcome. It is unfair and demotivating to tell someone they own revenue if they cannot approve discounts, choose tools, push back on unrealistic product promises, or shape pricing. In the same way, a “head of people” who cannot adjust hiring standards or challenge poor leadership behaviour does not genuinely own culture. They are just a messenger. Real ownership requires the ability to say no, to reallocate time or budget, and to shape the work rather than only reporting on it.
Consequence covers what happens when someone does step fully into ownership. If an employee shows real initiative, solves messy problems, and makes brave calls, but their role, scope, and recognition never change, they eventually pull back. Not every act of ownership needs to be rewarded with a promotion or bonus. In early stage teams, it can mean being invited earlier into strategic discussions, being trusted with broader responsibilities, or being asked to mentor others. On the downside, consequence should not mean public humiliation when mistakes happen. Instead, it should look like honest feedback, support to repair the damage, and clear expectations for improvement. When negligence is repeated, it may lead to difficult decisions about fit, but the process should feel fair and predictable, not arbitrary.
Putting this into practice works best when you start small. Choose one domain where things are consistently late or messy because “everyone is involved.” Sit with the person you believe should own it and co create a simple ownership map. Talk openly about what decisions they feel blocked on, what information they lack, and what authority they would need to act confidently. This is not just an assignment. It is an agreement about how the role will function day to day. Then commit to changing your own behaviour so that the map is real, not symbolic. That behavioural shift is often the hardest part for founders and senior leaders. If you have given ownership of a domain to someone, you must stop being the first one to react in that space. When colleagues come to you with questions that sit in the owner’s area, redirect them gently and consistently, encouraging them to loop in the owner and propose solutions there. When you disagree with a decision, try to address it in a way that preserves the person’s sense of agency. You can challenge their reasoning, share additional context, or ask them to revisit their choice, instead of simply overruling them in front of everyone. If every decision ends with you stepping in to apply the “real” answer, people will quickly understand that ownership is cosmetic.
You can reinforce the new pattern with small but deliberate rituals. In your weekly check ins, resist the urge to go line by line through task lists. Instead, ask each owner what key decision they made that moved their area forward. In post mortems after a failure, start with the question, “How did our system make it hard for this owner to see the risk earlier or to act in time?” Only after examining the design should you talk about individual actions. The order matters, because it signals to the whole team that you see mistakes as shared learning opportunities first, and individual accountability second.
Cultural context also plays a quiet role. In many Asian and Gulf environments, junior staff may worry that taking strong initiative will be interpreted as overstepping. Senior hires from hierarchical companies may hesitate to move without explicit instructions. As a leader, you need to model and reward a different pattern. Publicly acknowledge people who make thoughtful decisions even when you would have chosen a different path, and use those moments as chances to refine your principles together. Over time, your team will learn that what matters is not blind obedience, but responsible judgment. It is worth closing with one uncomfortable but important question. If you were an employee inside your own company, at your current level of influence, would taking ownership of a messy, ambiguous problem feel like a smart move for your career, or like a fast way to absorb blame for issues you only partly control? Would you have the context to make good choices, the authority to carry them out, and the psychological safety to learn in public? If your honest answer is no, then your people are not resisting ownership. They are responding rationally to the environment they are in.
The encouraging truth is that most barriers to ownership are not permanent. They are the cumulative result of design choices that can be revisited. Each time you make responsibility clearer, authority more aligned with accountability, and consequences more consistent and fair, you lower the cost of stepping forward. Over time, you will notice fewer escalations that land on your desk, more decisions made close to the work, and less drama around honest mistakes. That is the point at which ownership has finally moved out of the founder’s shadow and into the hands of the very people you hired to build the company with you.
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