How to get your team to “Own it!”

Business is a dangerous game; we founders often find ourselves playing it extremely close to the chest, with not even our teams knowing what truly lies behind closed doors. And it’s been this way forever.

But, is this really the best way to go about growing your business? I don’t think so.

A lack of transparency within your company often leads to a lack of ownership within your team. A team member who doesn’t know how your business is run or how it makes money will only be responsible for the role they are given, and their value addition to your company ends there. But a member who has taken ownership will do whatever it takes to make a business successful, despite both external and internal circumstances.

This has got me thinking a lot about the teams I’ve had and the part they’ve played in my entrepreneurial journey. Something I’ve noticed is how lucky I’ve been when it came to team members who took on ownership naturally, but I wanted to understand the core tenant of ownership as we began to scale up.

My Co-Founder, Ruban, and I had this conversation over a year ago, about role ownership amongst our team plays in the business we were growing. As a rapidly growing company that is looking to hit 3x to 5x growth annually, our main element of support came from our team, so we wanted to understand how we could further instill ownership in them.

This is when Ruban suggested I read a book called ‘The Great Game of Business’, which highlighted the role transparency and knowledge played in creating ownership amongst a team. This was an idea I found to be simple yet fascinating.

The Great Game of Business

While corporate transparency has been trending for a while, I have had a deep mistrust of its core premise. Most often, when entrepreneurs spoke about transparency within their businesses, they were talking about selective transparency, which only gave out selective information.

I understand that not everyone in your team can handle the amount of information that constantly flows through your business. Not everyone will understand the financial turmoil of margins in the business or the level of uncertainty us founders face daily.

However, ‘The Great Game of Business’ speaks about the fundamental principle, which highlights that to claim ownership, you need to be informed. It promotes an open-book management system, which teaches you to look at your business as a game.

The book states that one of the top factors which determine a team’s happiness is being in the know and that more people want access to information to be more engaged at work. It’s about using transparency and knowledge to drive financial results and cultural change.

“It’s about money and people.”

The core tenants of this philosophy are centered around:

• Educating team members in your team about how your business operates and its goals
• Empowering team members to take business decisions
• Engage team members by rewarding them

It’s about equipping your team members with the general business and financial knowledge they need to participate in company discussions.

But fret not, I am not asking you guys to have your accounting teams memorize the things your HR team does!

Educating your team

This is where you teach your team members, how everything they do impacts the business. This is where they will learn your company’s critical number, which is what will define winning for your company.

A well-informed team member should be able to answer questions such as, “What’s the game we are playing?” and “How do we win it?”

If they can’t answer these core questions, you cannot entrust them to take decisions concerning your business.

Empowering your team to make decisions

Understanding how to play the game of business would allow them to make better decisions. While this will be a slow process, your team members will eventually realize that they are no longer working in a mundane job. They will realize that it is a game, where their efforts will indicate whether both they and the company win or lose.

Rewarding team members

Just like any game, if your team’s efforts and decision-making result in a win for the company, they win a prize too. Rewarding your team members will not only push their careers forward, but also give them an incentive to take better ownership of the company.

Your team’s rewards can vary from compensations based on KPIs and also incentives that are connected to the financial goals of your company.

Common Problems with this model

After having tried to incorporate these philosophies into my own business, I came across several problems founders may encounter when putting all this into practice.

Firstly, you need to define the game well for your team. If you give your team a game plan, one in which they can’t influence the outcome, you will just end up confusing them.

When we first began running our businesses according to this, we realized that we needed to design our business around the information we were offering our team. Each time we would offer up information, the team would turn it into an engagement, and our wins would depend on their engagements.

However, as we went on the information we gave our team increased and we had them playing three different games, without ever excelling in one.

Since we needed them to play all these games for our business to win, we decided on breaking our team into three business units, each being given information with regards to the game they were playing. Finally we hired a manager along the way to support all three teams.

We also faced another hurdle when it came to the incentives we were offering our teams. Unlike other businesses, we had sales teams, therefore the incentives had to be aligned with their quarterly revenue targets. If we saw one of our team members playing the game well and taking ownership of the company, we rewarded them with extra pay + a title promotion with more responsibility.

So the goal of the ‘Game’ is not only to create long-term business success for your company but also to create long-term personal success for your team. And from what we’ve seen so far, if team members are taught to think and act like owners, everybody wins!

If you’re a founder looking for advice from someone who has been in your shoes, follow me on my LinkedIn and get updated on more entrepreneurial hacks that will aid your business.