Many organisations ask employees to think and act like owners. Far fewer are prepared to transfer the authority that ownership requires.
Modern work is filled with contradictions.
Some of these contradictions are natural by-products of very complex operating environments, filled with high levels of change and transformation against a backdrop of macro uncertainty and ongoing disruption.
But even if these contradictions are explainable, this doesn’t mean they should be accepted.
For example, employees are frequently encouraged to take ownership, exercise initiative and behave entrepreneurially. Yet the decisions that matter continue to move upwards. Managers often retain the final say, and at times act as blockers to innovation when new ideas need to pass through layers of approval. At a wider cultural level, failure is tolerated in principle but very rarely in reality.
This creates an environment where people are given more responsibility, but not necessarily more authority.
It is also how organisations create the appearance of empowerment without redistributing much actual power. Employees inherit more projects, more stakeholders and more accountability – often packaged up as “growth opportunities” – while the right to determine priorities, allocate resources or depart from established practice remains concentrated elsewhere.
Over time, people learn the real boundaries of the system, and eventually they stop proposing ideas unlikely to survive the approval process. They escalate decisions they could make themselves and ultimately wait for senior direction because experience has taught them that independent judgement carries more personal risk than organisational reward.
Ironically, leaders may then interpret that caution as a lack of initiative, even though it is a very rational response to an environment they have created.
The potential already inside the organisation
This gap between the language of empowerment and the reality of organisational control was the focus of a recent IMI Mini Masterclass on Redefining Work: The Power of Ownership and Agency.
Niki Avraam, a leadership and workforce expert who has spent more than two decades working inside organisations as an employment lawyer, entrepreneur and adviser, began by asking participants to identify the most underused resource in organisations.
Seventy per cent chose people’s hidden potential. Avraam wasn’t surprised. “The most underutilised resource is the untapped potential of people,” she said.
And no, she was not simply referring to the skills listed on an employee’s CV or those captured within a formal job description. She was referring to judgement, lived experience, perspective, undeclared capability and the ideas people might contribute if the organisation made room for them.
But this goes far beyond employee happiness. “I say it as a productivity point as well,” she noted, as the failure to use people’s full capability is not merely disappointing for the individual, but represents a massive organisational loss.
It appears in ideas that never surface, decisions that move more slowly than necessary, talent recruited externally while relevant capability remains hidden internally, and experienced employees gradually reducing their contribution to whatever the formal role requires.
Avraam described seeing “extraordinary talent thrive in some organisations and be kind of quietly extinguished in others”.
This is less about the quality of the individual and more about whether the organisation allowed that individual to shape their work, exercise judgement and contribute beyond the narrowest interpretation of their position.
Because an “ownership culture” cannot be judged by how often leaders use the word ownership. It must be judged by what employees are genuinely permitted to own.
For example, when people are repeatedly returned to the narrow boundaries of their role, or “put back in their box” to borrow the common parlance – something changes. Expect a decline in energy and motivation and less proposals for new initiatives, along with that original instinct to improve the organisation and add more value becoming gradually replaced with the safer instinct to complete the assigned task and execute on the BAU.
The employee has not necessarily become less capable overnight. But they have learned that much of their capability is not wanted.
Flexibility is valuable. It is not the same as agency
The experience of work has changed significantly in recent years. Hybrid arrangements, flexible hours and greater consideration of individual needs have all altered the relationship between employers and employees (albeit there is vocal pushback in some corners).
But these changes should not automatically be mistaken for empowerment.
The ability to decide where or when a task is completed is different from the ability to shape the task itself. Employees may enjoy considerable flexibility over their working day while having little authority over priorities, resources or decisions.
While flexibility changes the conditions around work, genuine agency changes a person’s relationship with the work.
Drawing on research into human motivation, Avraam identified three things people need to thrive: ownership, competence and connection.
Ownership is the ability to exercise agency. Competence is the sense that today’s work is developing the person capable of taking on tomorrow’s challenges. Connection is not only a relationship with colleagues, but a clear relationship between an individual’s contribution and a purpose larger than the task itself.
This is a more demanding proposition than inviting employees to contribute to a workshop, for example, because real agency asks whether people can influence how work is done, challenge established methods and make decisions within meaningful boundaries. It also tests whether leaders want employees to think independently.
What’s even more revealing than a leader asking for ideas is what happens when an employee proposes something the leader did not anticipate.
Designing ownership rather than hoping for it
Starting off as a young employment lawyer, Avraam was given room to build new employment-law practices within firms. Her role wasn’t confined to legal drafting or a conventional billing target. It was redesigned to include business development, client growth and entrepreneurial responsibility, with performance and remuneration structures adjusted accordingly.
“I had ownership over the work that I was doing,” said Avraam, “Not in terms of equity, but in terms of owning the purpose.”
This doesn’t mean everyone should be left to invent their own job, but organisational design can either reveal or suppress capability.
“All of the stuff happened to me by luck,” she said. “I’m now asking for organisations to do it by design.”
Many attendees felt that distinction—between luck and design—was the most important insight in the session.
After all, most organisations can identify a small number of people who somehow found the right manager, the right project or the right moment to demonstrate what they could do, and their progression is then described as evidence that the organisation develops talent.
But exceptional cases do not necessarily prove that a system works, just because a few people managed to escape its normal constraints.
An ownership culture cannot depend on fortunate accidents. It requires structures that repeatedly help people identify, demonstrate and apply capabilities beyond the narrowest interpretation of their role.
The fixed job description is becoming less useful
The first element of Avraam’s ownership framework was job crafting.
She argued “the era of the fixed job title” as dead—or at least coming to an end.
This isn’t to say organisations no longer need defined roles, and the clear accountability that comes with fixed job titles remains essential. But a highly prescriptive job description can become a ceiling on contribution, especially when technology, customer needs and organisational priorities are changing faster than formal structures.
A role audit, Avraam suggested, should ask more than what tasks an employee completes.
For example, what is the role actually delivering? What is it developing in the person performing it? Is it building judgement, pattern recognition or commercial understanding? What work is changing or disappearing? What higher-value contribution could replace it? How does the role connect to the wider mission?
And then there is a transformative question, according to Avraam:
“What are you good at that we’re not using?”
In a conventional system, the organisation determines the role and evaluates how well the person fits it. This question allows the individual to identify capabilities that the existing role may not see.
It does not mean every answer must result in a redesigned job, but it begins a conversation about where individual capability and organisational value might meet.
It may also reveal something very uncomfortable: that organisations who complain about talent shortages don’t always know what talent they already possess.
Agency must include the right to develop judgement
But ownership cannot exist if people are protected from every difficult decision.
Judgement is built through use. Confidence grows through carrying responsibility. People do not become capable of operating at a higher level merely by observing someone else do it.
Avraam’s second pillar was a concept she calls “preferred discomfort”: intentionally choosing experiences that push boundaries and broaden horizons.
She distinguished this from both comfort cultures, where people are shielded from the very experiences that might develop them, and pressure cultures, where challenge is imposed without sufficient support.
The first produces stagnation, while the second produces exhaustion (and worse).
“Preferred discomfort” depends on challenge accompanied by what Avraam called “scaffolding”: coaching, sponsorship, clear boundaries and permission to fail.
The cultural distinction is between a leader who has your back and an environment in which employees feel they must watch their back.
In a psychologically safe ownership culture, Avraam noted, “Mistakes become learning moments, not career events.”
This article began with a discussion of contradictions, and there is a massive contradiction in how many corporate entities approach innovation. They say they want experimentation, but employees remain highly alert to the career consequences of an experiment that does not succeed.
While the formal message encourages risk, the lived experience encourages caution, and employees quickly learn which of the two to believe.
At the same time, agency without safety can also become a form of abandonment, whereby a leader transfers a difficult problem, withdraws support and later presents the experience as empowerment. Real developmental ownership requires leaders to remain involved without taking the work back, creating the conditions in which someone else can decide, act, learn – and recover.
AI makes work design more urgent
There is an argument AI is beginning to absorb tasks that once helped people build capability, a risk Avraam described as a “broken ladder”. Early-career tasks like research, drafting and due diligence may appear routine, but they also develop pattern recognition, contextual understanding and professional judgement.
If organisations automate those tasks without redesigning the developmental journey around them, they may improve short-term efficiency while weakening the pipeline of people capable of performing more complex work later.
The answer is not to preserve low-value work for its own sake, but to ask what developmental function that work served and how it will now be replaced.
The same applies to the time AI saves.
If a four-hour task can be completed in 20 minutes, filling the remaining time with more versions of the same tasks is the least imaginative thing you can do.
“It’s not looking at productivity and doubling down and doing the same thing within that space that it’s freed up,” said Avraam. “It’s what can be done instead.” Namely what higher-value, more creative or more developmental work can occupy the space technology has released.
At this point AI adoption becomes a leadership and work-design challenge rather than a technology problem. Productivity gains may come from completing existing work faster, but genuine transformation comes from redesigning what people are now capable of contributing.
More freedom may require clearer structures
The final pillar of Avraam’s framework was agility over rigidity.
This included making it easier for people to move between roles, functions and projects, rather than trapping capability inside fixed organisational boxes.
But she was careful not to equate agility with the absence of structure.
In fact, she argued that organisations may need stronger structures to support greater fluidity:
“You’ve almost got to have heavier structures to facilitate that type of fluidity,” she said.
This sophisticated point is often missing from discussions of empowerment.
Autonomy does not mean that everyone decides everything. It depends on clarity about purpose, boundaries, standards and escalation. People need to know what the organisation is trying to achieve, which principles are non-negotiable and where they genuinely have room to act.
Poorly designed empowerment produces confusion. Properly designed agency can produce speed.
The choice is therefore not between control and chaos. It is between control exercised habitually and authority distributed deliberately.
Some decisions must remain centralised. Regulation, governance and material risk cannot simply be wished away. But leaders should be able to explain why a decision needs to sit where it does.
“Because that is how we have always done it” is not a governance framework.
What leaders are willing to stop doing
The greatest barrier to ownership may not be policy or structure, but the leader’s own habits.
What does this mean?
Avraam spoke about her earlier experience as a top-down leader. She recalled arriving with a bottle of champagne after her legal team had won a major case, expecting them to share her enthusiasm, only to encounter a team that appeared disengaged from the achievement.
Her passion had not automatically become their ownership.
This prompted a change in how she led, i.e. asking more questions, considering people’s potential more broadly and beginning to see the leader as a “custodian” of other people’s growth.
This requires leaders to reflect deeply and examine the behaviours through which they retain control.
While reviewing every document may protect quality, it may also prevent others from developing judgement. Having the final word may create clarity, but it may also teach people their contribution is provisional until the most senior person has spoken.
Intervening whenever uncertainty rises may reduce immediate risk. It may also ensure that the organisation remains dependent on the same small group of decision-makers. And so on.
No, leaders should not abandon accountability. They need to stop confusing accountability with personal involvement in every consequential choice.
As a modest starting point?
“Hand over one decision,” said Avraam, then, “Drop one of those leadership patterns, see what happens.”
That is a true test of an ownership culture that engagement surveys or values statements struggle to capture.
Identify one decision that routinely travels upwards but could safely sit closer to the relevant knowledge. Clarify the boundaries, then transfer it explicitly. Resist the urge to retake control when it is approached differently.
The outcome may not be exactly what the leader would have produced. But that is not necessarily evidence that the experiment failed.
From the language of ownership to the practice of it
Organisations already have much of the vocabulary.
They speak about empowerment, innovation and accountability. They encourage people to take initiative and bring their whole selves to work.
But does the organisation’s distribution of authority match its language?
Can people shape how they contribute? Can they make decisions that carry real consequence? Can they try something unfamiliar without one mistake becoming a career event? Can they move towards work that better uses their capability? Are leaders prepared to relinquish habits that make them feel indispensable?
Ownership is not created by asking employees to care more about an outcome they did not help shape.
Nor is it created by giving people more work while retaining the right to decide how that work will be done.
Real ownership begins when responsibility and authority start to move together.
Many organisations are comfortable sharing the responsibility.
The test is whether they are prepared to share the power.
IMI Perspective
At IMI, we believe the organisations that will outperform over the coming decade will not necessarily be those with the smartest strategies or the most advanced technology. They will be those that unlock more of the capability they already possess.
That begins by recognising that ownership cannot exist without authority, and that leadership development happens through exercising judgement, not simply acquiring knowledge. The true test of an ownership culture is therefore not how often leaders talk about empowerment, but how willingly they transfer meaningful decisions to those closest to the work.
Ultimately, the greatest barrier to organisational ownership may not be process or structure, but leaders’ willingness to let go. When responsibility and authority move together, organisations do more than empower their people, they build the confidence, judgement and adaptability that long-term organisational success depends upon.
