Conscious Ownership

There are no poor teams, only poor leaders. This is a humbling thought for most business owners to accept. That being said, the successful executive realizes how critical this mindset is to building a high-performing, successful team. I call this Conscious Ownership.

When leaders who embody Conscious Ownership train their people to achieve constantly higher standards of performance, they appreciate that when it comes to benchmarks, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you accept from your people.

When setting expectations, regardless of what has been said or written, if second-rate performance is accepted and no one is held accountable, if there are no consequences, then that very performance becomes the new norm, a lower standard. Executives and owners simply must administer the performance standards. Results of failing to meet the standards need not be severe, but executives and managers must ensure that tasks are repeated until the higher, expected performance is achieved and becomes the new standard.

Executives need to teach the new standards in such a way that the entire team utilizes the concepts of Conscious Ownership.

The executive has to pull together the various elements of the team’s middle management to support one another, communicating across departmental lines, with everyone focused exclusively on how to best achieve the recognized targets.

Who doesn’t want to be part of a winning team? Yet we often don’t know how to do this, or in some cases, we just need motivation and encouragement. Conscious Teams need a pressing function, a direction, motivating the different members to work together to accomplish the goal. In the end, that is what leadership is all about.

Once a culture of Conscious Ownership is built into a company at every level, the entire group performs better and continues to improve, even when the leader/executive is temporarily unavailable for review or comment.

Life comes at you fast and you can expect it to throw any number of situations in the way of a business or department. Every team must have junior managers or leaders ready to step up and take on the responsibilities of their immediate bosses, carrying on with the project and getting the job done.

Neither executive nor middle management should never be satisfied. It might sound strange to some business school grads, but it’s so true. They always need to strive to improve, and they have to start by building that mindset into their teams. Facing the facts through a realistic assessment of themselves and their team’s performance and identifying weaknesses is the way good executives and middle-managers strengthen their team’s developing goals, or plans that overcome the challenges.

The best teams are constantly looking to improve, add capability, and push the standards higher. It starts with the executive and spreads to the middle managers and down to the front liners. At this point it becomes the culture, the new standard for the company. The recognition that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders, facilitates ownership and enables teams to dominate in any field.

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Frank Hopkins is a life coach in Baton Rouge who is certified as a Professional Coach (CPC) by the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC). Frank has helped numerous people to go through business changes in a way that is positive and transformative.