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This is a one-weird-trick that management tries to use on underlings: they talk about motivating a sense of ownership to things. But this doesn't jive with the

This is a one-weird-trick that management tries to use on underlings: they talk about motivating a sense of ownership to things. But this doesn't jive with the fact that employees are hirelings and thus have no ownership to anything in the company. But it would be convenient for management to push more of the responsibilities of ownership on the underlings, even though they will get none of the benefits. This of course assumes that the employee has no stocks in the company... but it would have to be more than just a symbolic amount in order to count.

lazide 3y ago
This attitude is the path to hell. If you own nothing (not even your own attitude, or the quality of what you are doing), then you’re a perpetual victim, always at the whims of others, and always unable to change anything that matters for you. If you take ownership of you and what you do, and how it impacts others and can produce value, you can make choices. To say no. To say yes. To push for recognition, and leave if you don’t get it. Owning what you’re working on (and refusing to work for someone who won’t let you) is usually a key part of mental health and actual real world success for everyone.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > This attitude is the path to hell. I disagree the other way around is. A lot of people suddenly realize they are 50 and they put decades into someone else's dream. Be realistic, do what you are paid for, but save the heroism for your own efforts.
  - lazide 3y ago
    No one is suggesting killing yourself for someone else’s dream. That is trying to take ownership for something that you have little scope to impact, frankly, and as you note don’t see the benefits for. I’m saying, having ownership of what you are doing and what you control is essential. Not doing so is a path to hell. That can be the section of the codebase you’re specializing in, or just the effectiveness and quality of the code you’re producing. Or the product you’re delivering, as delivered. If you don’t think the pay you’re getting is fair for that, then that is a separate issue - and one solved by not doing it, not by trying to pretend you had no part in the deal.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Wouldn't the word responsibility be more accurate here for what you are trying to describe? own·er·ship the act, state, or right of possessing something. re·spon·si·bil·i·ty the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone. Part of me that's pushing back here is my manipulative language detector going off.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Possession is control, is it not? Ownership is responsibility + benefit (or loss) for an outcome IMO, protected by some kind of agreement. Societal or contractual. Title. Employment agreement/laws. If there is positive benefit received on a good outcome + a responsibility for maintenance and the like, that is a form of ownership IMO. If a negative benefit comes from damage/destruction/bad things happening to that thing, that also tracks. Anyone who owns real property quickly discovers there isn’t anything like truly unencumbered and unconditional ownership of anything - the first property tax bill will make that clear if nothing else. That doesn’t mean someone doesn’t take on significant risks and benefits (hopefully) from owning it. It can still be yanked away if they don’t pay certain people or follow certain rules - or via Imminent Domain. Someone working a job has more constrained ownership, but it still exists. And like buying a property, they need to choose carefully as they’ll still end up with consequences regardless.
        willcipriano 3y ago
        > Possession is control, is it not? Is possession == control then control == possession. We can have a world like that, if someone worked in some role for a period of time we could have a legal process for them claim their proceeds of the enterprise. That sounds really complicated and it isn't the world we live in today. I think the reason the word responsibility isn't used is generally you are expected to pay for people who take responsibilities off your hands. A plumber takes responsibility for your toilet problem, if you also have a unrelated faucet problem he can take responsibility for that as well, but not for free. On the other hand, owners aren't expected to be paid like that as they profit off the overall health of the enterprise, without providing that sort of mechanism, I don't see how you have any real ownership.
- mkreis 3y ago
  I agree with your comment, but I think the post above is trying to make another point: That in companies you often are expected to take ownership (or are assigned ownership), although the environment does not allow you to make choices - which you refer to as a consequence of having true ownership, right?
  - lazide 3y ago
    If you have no actual ability to make choices at all (including what you do, how you do it, what choices you make, etc.), then yes you have no ownership except for your turning the crank and how well you do it. Which is still a thing. It’s rarely that tightly constrained however. If it is, then time to bail. It’s burn out city.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    What I noticed decently often is that the safe decisions you can make are fairly constrained. By safe I mean that even if things don't go well you will not be held too responsible in a material way. This might be communicated directly but usually is just a constant background vibe reinforced by the company/social norms. You can step over that line and make un-safe decisions but then the risk is implicitly more directly on you.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Risk/reward. It’s also easy to take a lot of risk with no possible reward, of course.
  - dave881 3y ago
    That's the way I generally understand ownership to work in this context. I should have the authority to make decisions about how to execute a project I'm given (or take) responsibility of. In the context of "Servant Leadership," how well I execute the task should inform my manager's response. If it is not done correctly/well, I should get the feedback needed to ensure I don't repeat those mistakes. Future work assignments should be adjusted based on how "wrong" my work was. Maybe the project was too complex, and I should be given a more limited scope for the next one, or maybe being shown the corrections is sufficient to trust me with the same level of work next time.
- iamwil 3y ago
  By ownership, the OP means "accountable in the micro". Even if you don't own the company or the macro, there is a sense of cultivating your own skills and mental well-being when you make yourself accountable in the micro.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    It’s also just as often detrimental and leads to burnout when that “accountability” is a delusion pushed by management because the employee has no real control and the whims of management override any real choices they can make. When someone really has ownership, management has to come to terms with the fact that the owner may make choices that are suboptimal to the company for the sake of their or their teams’ sanity. The majority of management never make that mental leap.
    - jonfw 3y ago
      Good leadership (which servant leadership is intended to facilitate) is all about fixing those problems. Management shouldn't override any real choices on a whim, and management should work to align incentives such that an owner acts in everybody's best interests at once
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      It's not a binary, you can take ownership of what you can and accept a lack of control where you cannot. If that line is too far one way or the other it's time to leave.
      - lazide 3y ago
        100% matches my experience. Also, if someone in management is using emotional manipulation techniques (gaslighting, etc.).
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Completely and utterly false. Even a slave owns his own mind and how it reacts to things. (Insert Stoic spiel here.) And it is best to cultivate a mind which is in accordance with the Serenity Prayer. Another thing entirely is what you formally own. I mean as in by-law, not some aspirational or motivational bullshit. And someone is trying to manipulate you if they try to foist the responsibilities of ownership onto you (even if it is just in your own mind—staying late, fretting about it in the shower, etc.) by encouraging “taking ownership” without actually physically letting you own it. > Owning what you’re working on (and refusing to work for someone who won’t let you) is usually a key part of mental health and actual real world success for everyone. Yes sir/madame.
  - tome 3y ago
    > Completely and utterly false As far as I can tell you lazide are in agreement. If your comment didn't start with "Completely and utterly false" I'd think you were writing a supporting/reinforcing follow-up!
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      Hrmph. This is what often happens on the internet: - Someone makes a cynical comment on some specific topic - Someone else makes a completely inappropriate extrapolation and concludes—based on nothing—that the first poster is making an argument for being defeatist and negative for its own sake - The first poster has to then correct this inappropriate extrapolation—which was based on nothing—by stating that, yes, it is good to (say) have a positive attitude in your life - Onlookers act puzzled as the first poster is contradicting himself (apparently) by hostilely agreeing with the second poster that having a good mind-attitude in life is good! So yes I suppose I could be agreeing with the second poster...
  - lazide 3y ago
    I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or both. Or neither. Mind clarifying?
    - 3y ago
mkreis 3y ago
100%. It's a cheap motivational "hack" to call it ownership, but it's just responsibility without little power to make necessary changes. A recipe for frustration. In the example with the trash above, can the boy now choose to get a bigger trash can, so that he does not have to carry it outside so often? ;-)
- dfee 3y ago
  Even better, externalize: throw your trash in the kitchen trash, so the adults have to take it out. Keep the watch. Profit.
tstrimple 3y ago
I'm confused as to what you think work is. Managers are just hirelings as well. They have different responsibilities, which includes effective delegation. If you think "ownership" of a process is just a trick to get employees to work, what's the alternative here? You're responsible for the outcomes of this process but don't own it and thus can't guide the direction of it? That sounds patently terrible. The benefit of owning a process is the control you have over it. I can't tell you how many times I've heard engineers bitch about the decisions made over their head that they have to conform to. But now engineers apparently are just going to bitch if given control over the process. There's no winning with some of you.
- rexpop 3y ago
  The alternative is actual ownership.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Are you fine getting $0 salary for the year if your area of ownership doesn't do well that year?
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      What kind of ownership entails “salaries” based on “areas of ownership”? This just seems confused. Of course! If you have ownership of something then you also bear the burden in case of loss or mismanagement. Blatantly obvious answer to a useless intended-as-rhetorical question.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  > I'm confused as to what you think work is. Managers are just hirelings as well. So what? People can be hired to be more direct servants of the ownership class. They often have more pay and power after all.
baz00 3y ago
Ownership is about mandate and ability to effect change. That doesn’t imply any material benefit other than being paid to do it. What management roles tend to do is assign ownership without mandate and ability.
fweimer 3y ago
Some companies literally assign to you ownership of your upstream contributions, whether you did them on your time or theirs. But maybe that too is to convey a sense of ownership that isn't actually there.
nvahalik 3y ago
> This of course assumes that the employee has no stocks in the company I'm grateful that I get to work for a company that encourages growth and promotes heavily from the inside. Not all organizations are like this. But Servant leadership and companies growing quickly go hand in hand.
jonfw 3y ago
Managers are underlings in that sense too. They don't own enough stock or have enough influence that they would rationally be thinking of the gains they'd make in their stock. Managers take ownership because they're looking for their project to succeed, they want to advance their career, etc. and the same applies to "underlings"
potamic 3y ago
You may not have ownership of the company but you can have ownership within the scope of your work. For instance, as a developer there are so many areas which involve decision making from code design, testability, reliability, observability, choice of tooling, non-functional roadmap, documentation and onboarding etc. Of course, working within an organizational framework, you may not have infinite degrees of freedom across these, but if you don't have at least a handful of degrees of freedom in what you do, then you depend on somebody to tell you exactly what needs to be done all the time and your work will not be very interesting.

lazide 3y ago

This attitude is the path to hell. If you own nothing (not even your own attitude, or the quality of what you are doing), then you’re a perpetual victim, always at the whims of others, and always unable to change anything that matters for you. If you take ownership of you and what you do, and how it impacts others and can produce value, you can make choices. To say no. To say yes. To push for recognition, and leave if you don’t get it. Owning what you’re working on (and refusing to work for someone who won’t let you) is usually a key part of mental health and actual real world success for everyone.

willcipriano 3y ago
> This attitude is the path to hell. I disagree the other way around is. A lot of people suddenly realize they are 50 and they put decades into someone else's dream. Be realistic, do what you are paid for, but save the heroism for your own efforts.
- lazide 3y ago
  No one is suggesting killing yourself for someone else’s dream. That is trying to take ownership for something that you have little scope to impact, frankly, and as you note don’t see the benefits for. I’m saying, having ownership of what you are doing and what you control is essential. Not doing so is a path to hell. That can be the section of the codebase you’re specializing in, or just the effectiveness and quality of the code you’re producing. Or the product you’re delivering, as delivered. If you don’t think the pay you’re getting is fair for that, then that is a separate issue - and one solved by not doing it, not by trying to pretend you had no part in the deal.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Wouldn't the word responsibility be more accurate here for what you are trying to describe? own·er·ship the act, state, or right of possessing something. re·spon·si·bil·i·ty the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone. Part of me that's pushing back here is my manipulative language detector going off.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Possession is control, is it not? Ownership is responsibility + benefit (or loss) for an outcome IMO, protected by some kind of agreement. Societal or contractual. Title. Employment agreement/laws. If there is positive benefit received on a good outcome + a responsibility for maintenance and the like, that is a form of ownership IMO. If a negative benefit comes from damage/destruction/bad things happening to that thing, that also tracks. Anyone who owns real property quickly discovers there isn’t anything like truly unencumbered and unconditional ownership of anything - the first property tax bill will make that clear if nothing else. That doesn’t mean someone doesn’t take on significant risks and benefits (hopefully) from owning it. It can still be yanked away if they don’t pay certain people or follow certain rules - or via Imminent Domain. Someone working a job has more constrained ownership, but it still exists. And like buying a property, they need to choose carefully as they’ll still end up with consequences regardless.
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        > Possession is control, is it not? Is possession == control then control == possession. We can have a world like that, if someone worked in some role for a period of time we could have a legal process for them claim their proceeds of the enterprise. That sounds really complicated and it isn't the world we live in today. I think the reason the word responsibility isn't used is generally you are expected to pay for people who take responsibilities off your hands. A plumber takes responsibility for your toilet problem, if you also have a unrelated faucet problem he can take responsibility for that as well, but not for free. On the other hand, owners aren't expected to be paid like that as they profit off the overall health of the enterprise, without providing that sort of mechanism, I don't see how you have any real ownership.
mkreis 3y ago
I agree with your comment, but I think the post above is trying to make another point: That in companies you often are expected to take ownership (or are assigned ownership), although the environment does not allow you to make choices - which you refer to as a consequence of having true ownership, right?
- lazide 3y ago
  If you have no actual ability to make choices at all (including what you do, how you do it, what choices you make, etc.), then yes you have no ownership except for your turning the crank and how well you do it. Which is still a thing. It’s rarely that tightly constrained however. If it is, then time to bail. It’s burn out city.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  What I noticed decently often is that the safe decisions you can make are fairly constrained. By safe I mean that even if things don't go well you will not be held too responsible in a material way. This might be communicated directly but usually is just a constant background vibe reinforced by the company/social norms. You can step over that line and make un-safe decisions but then the risk is implicitly more directly on you.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Risk/reward. It’s also easy to take a lot of risk with no possible reward, of course.
- dave881 3y ago
  That's the way I generally understand ownership to work in this context. I should have the authority to make decisions about how to execute a project I'm given (or take) responsibility of. In the context of "Servant Leadership," how well I execute the task should inform my manager's response. If it is not done correctly/well, I should get the feedback needed to ensure I don't repeat those mistakes. Future work assignments should be adjusted based on how "wrong" my work was. Maybe the project was too complex, and I should be given a more limited scope for the next one, or maybe being shown the corrections is sufficient to trust me with the same level of work next time.
iamwil 3y ago
By ownership, the OP means "accountable in the micro". Even if you don't own the company or the macro, there is a sense of cultivating your own skills and mental well-being when you make yourself accountable in the micro.
- civilitty 3y ago
  It’s also just as often detrimental and leads to burnout when that “accountability” is a delusion pushed by management because the employee has no real control and the whims of management override any real choices they can make. When someone really has ownership, management has to come to terms with the fact that the owner may make choices that are suboptimal to the company for the sake of their or their teams’ sanity. The majority of management never make that mental leap.
  - jonfw 3y ago
    Good leadership (which servant leadership is intended to facilitate) is all about fixing those problems. Management shouldn't override any real choices on a whim, and management should work to align incentives such that an owner acts in everybody's best interests at once
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    It's not a binary, you can take ownership of what you can and accept a lack of control where you cannot. If that line is too far one way or the other it's time to leave.
    - lazide 3y ago
      100% matches my experience. Also, if someone in management is using emotional manipulation techniques (gaslighting, etc.).
avgcorrection 3y ago
Completely and utterly false. Even a slave owns his own mind and how it reacts to things. (Insert Stoic spiel here.) And it is best to cultivate a mind which is in accordance with the Serenity Prayer. Another thing entirely is what you formally own. I mean as in by-law, not some aspirational or motivational bullshit. And someone is trying to manipulate you if they try to foist the responsibilities of ownership onto you (even if it is just in your own mind—staying late, fretting about it in the shower, etc.) by encouraging “taking ownership” without actually physically letting you own it. > Owning what you’re working on (and refusing to work for someone who won’t let you) is usually a key part of mental health and actual real world success for everyone. Yes sir/madame.
- tome 3y ago
  > Completely and utterly false As far as I can tell you lazide are in agreement. If your comment didn't start with "Completely and utterly false" I'd think you were writing a supporting/reinforcing follow-up!
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    Hrmph. This is what often happens on the internet: - Someone makes a cynical comment on some specific topic - Someone else makes a completely inappropriate extrapolation and concludes—based on nothing—that the first poster is making an argument for being defeatist and negative for its own sake - The first poster has to then correct this inappropriate extrapolation—which was based on nothing—by stating that, yes, it is good to (say) have a positive attitude in your life - Onlookers act puzzled as the first poster is contradicting himself (apparently) by hostilely agreeing with the second poster that having a good mind-attitude in life is good! So yes I suppose I could be agreeing with the second poster...
- lazide 3y ago
  I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or both. Or neither. Mind clarifying?
  - 3y ago

mkreis 3y ago

100%. It's a cheap motivational "hack" to call it ownership, but it's just responsibility without little power to make necessary changes. A recipe for frustration. In the example with the trash above, can the boy now choose to get a bigger trash can, so that he does not have to carry it outside so often? ;-)

dfee 3y ago
Even better, externalize: throw your trash in the kitchen trash, so the adults have to take it out. Keep the watch. Profit.

tstrimple 3y ago

I'm confused as to what you think work is. Managers are just hirelings as well. They have different responsibilities, which includes effective delegation. If you think "ownership" of a process is just a trick to get employees to work, what's the alternative here? You're responsible for the outcomes of this process but don't own it and thus can't guide the direction of it? That sounds patently terrible. The benefit of owning a process is the control you have over it. I can't tell you how many times I've heard engineers bitch about the decisions made over their head that they have to conform to. But now engineers apparently are just going to bitch if given control over the process. There's no winning with some of you.

rexpop 3y ago
The alternative is actual ownership.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Are you fine getting $0 salary for the year if your area of ownership doesn't do well that year?
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    What kind of ownership entails “salaries” based on “areas of ownership”? This just seems confused. Of course! If you have ownership of something then you also bear the burden in case of loss or mismanagement. Blatantly obvious answer to a useless intended-as-rhetorical question.
avgcorrection 3y ago
> I'm confused as to what you think work is. Managers are just hirelings as well. So what? People can be hired to be more direct servants of the ownership class. They often have more pay and power after all.

baz00 3y ago

Ownership is about mandate and ability to effect change. That doesn’t imply any material benefit other than being paid to do it. What management roles tend to do is assign ownership without mandate and ability.

fweimer 3y ago

Some companies literally assign to you ownership of your upstream contributions, whether you did them on your time or theirs. But maybe that too is to convey a sense of ownership that isn't actually there.

nvahalik 3y ago

> This of course assumes that the employee has no stocks in the company I'm grateful that I get to work for a company that encourages growth and promotes heavily from the inside. Not all organizations are like this. But Servant leadership and companies growing quickly go hand in hand.

jonfw 3y ago

Managers are underlings in that sense too. They don't own enough stock or have enough influence that they would rationally be thinking of the gains they'd make in their stock. Managers take ownership because they're looking for their project to succeed, they want to advance their career, etc. and the same applies to "underlings"

potamic 3y ago

You may not have ownership of the company but you can have ownership within the scope of your work. For instance, as a developer there are so many areas which involve decision making from code design, testability, reliability, observability, choice of tooling, non-functional roadmap, documentation and onboarding etc. Of course, working within an organizational framework, you may not have infinite degrees of freedom across these, but if you don't have at least a handful of degrees of freedom in what you do, then you depend on somebody to tell you exactly what needs to be done all the time and your work will not be very interesting.