Founders, stop trying to make everyone an owner

In boardrooms and leadership meetings across industries, CEOs consistently wrestle with the same fundamental challenge. Whether leading high-growth startups or established enterprises, they eventually ask some version of the same pressing question.

• "How can I get my employees to take true responsibility?" 
• "Why aren't they more proactive?" 
• "How can they think more entrepreneurially?" 

At the heart of this challenge is the disconnect between employees' commitment to tasks and the company's drive for results, and a gap in how responsibility is understood and assumed. Founders naturally adopt an owner mentality, focused on outcomes and seeing themselves as accountable for the company's entire performance. Employees operate within a traditional labour framework, where responsibility is often task-based and input-driven.

Through my work with dozens of leadership teams, I've discovered that our fundamental assumptions about responsibility in organisations may be backward. Business leaders have long tried to foster an ownership mentality — asking employees to think and act like entrepreneurs — yet this approach fights against human nature. What drives real team performance isn't individual ownership of tasks and outcomes, but the web of mutual responsibilities people feel toward each other — what I've come to call 'relational responsibility', which recognises our strongest drive to perform comes from our commitments to each other and mutual accountability among team members. 

How CEOs can instil responsibility

Entrepreneurial responsibility

CEOs can cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset within their teams which encourages employees to think beyond their defined roles and focus on outcomes. However, studies show that entrepreneurial tendencies are partially heritable (40% according to twin studies) and heavily influenced by early life experiences. 

Creating true owners within your organisation requires finding people with natural entrepreneurial tendencies and investing in their development through intensive coaching and deep mentoring. You might succeed in developing two or three employee-entrepreneurs per year by doing this, and when successful these employees become truly invested in the company's success, often seeking equity to match their increased commitment and accountability.

Though while this individualistic approach focused on personal accountability and individual outcomes works for entrepreneurs who truly own the business, or the select few you identify in your organisation, it may not translate effectively across a company; studies indicate that only about 10-15% of employees naturally gravitate toward entrepreneurial thinking.

Relational responsibility

Alternatively, CEOs can cultivate a sense of relational responsibility within the team, which leverages the fact that we naturally care more about our relationships and reputations with others than about abstract outcomes or systems. 

By framing responsibility around interdependent relationships within the team, CEOs foster a culture where commitment is based on mutual support, collaboration and collective success. The employee's commitment is strengthened through their connection to the team, not by an entrepreneurial ownership mentality.

This dual understanding of responsibility — individual ownership versus relational accountability — helps explain why traditional approaches to building responsibility often fall short. While cultivating entrepreneurial ownership works well for select individuals, relational responsibility offers broader application across organisations.

Every leader aims to promote taking responsibility for results rather than just completing tasks in their teams. But many leaders I work with are frustrated when this approach doesn't deliver the results they expect.

The reason accountability often falls short is tied to the elusive nature of responsibility. While it's usually clear what we are responsible for — our goals, deliverables and role descriptions outline those responsibilities — it's far less clear who we are responsible to. This creates a gap in performance and motivation that many leaders struggle to bridge.

In most cases, trying to solve this issue by defining a compelling purpose, mission or vision for the company doesn't do the job. Most leaders miss the mark when it comes to who we are responsible to. We assume responsibility flows upward to the CEO, the founders or to the company. However, the key shift in thinking is that we are not solely responsible to the company or its leadership. We are responsible to each other, what I call the relational responsibility shift.

This shift is particularly powerful because it aligns with how humans naturally operate. When team members understand how their work impacts their colleagues' success, responsibility becomes personal and meaningful in a way that purely outcome-based accountability cannot match.

When accountability is distributed across a network of relationships rather than residing in individual silos, there are fewer opportunities for tasks to fall through the cracks; teams become more resilient.

In a high-functioning team, responsibility is no longer just about fulfilling individual duties — it's about ensuring the success of the people around you. The distinction between a group and a team lies here: a group is simply a collection of individuals, often working with little dependency on one another. A team, on the other hand, relies on interdependence, where each person is accountable not only for their own role but also for ensuring the success of their teammates.

How to implement this shift inside your startup

Relational responsibility faces a particular challenge in startups: team composition is inherently unstable. High-growth periods often bring rapid hiring, reorganisations and sometimes turnover. This fluidity can make it harder to maintain the strong relationships that relational responsibility depends on.

But when teams change frequently, having clear processes for quickly building functional and personal relationships becomes even more important. The practices outlined below become essential mechanisms for maintaining team cohesion and performance through periods of change.

A CEO I worked with recently was preparing to raise a €50m funding round. Like many leaders, he initially focused on individual incentives to drive performance. His team's response revealed a common pattern. Individual incentives did boost short-term productivity, but they also created silos. Team members became focused on their personal metrics rather than collective success.

More concerning was the effect on problem-solving. When challenges arose, finger-pointing replaced collaboration. 

This scenario illustrates why relational responsibility matters. When we shifted focus to team performance and mutual accountability, the dynamic changed. Team members began approaching challenges collectively, supporting each other's success rather than competing for individual recognition.

One key takeaway we discussed was that for this relational responsibility to work, there needs to be clear agreements between team members. When everyone understands not just their own responsibilities but how those responsibilities impact their colleagues' work, the team becomes more resilient. It becomes easier to remind the team that they are accountable not just to the company or the CEO, but to each other. This shift in thinking opens the door to a deeper, more sustainable level of collaboration and accountability.

To introduce relational responsibility well, you need to strengthen both the functional relationship and the personal relationships:

Part 1: Strengthen Functional Relationships

Build Mutual Awareness 

One exercise that helps team members understand the dependencies is to have them reframe their own responsibilities through the lens of their colleagues: how is it impacting their work? How is your outcome the foundation, or starting point, of someone else's role? How can a great job help someone else excel?

Define what great collaboration looks like 

Teams identify key interfaces/dependencies and define what great collaboration will look like. How can teams cooperate to consistently operate at the level of greatness? This often involves agreeing on leading indicators to predict whether output (quality or quantity) is going up or down. A simple example is the pre-qualification of leads through marketing for later conversion through their sales colleagues.

Document clear agreements 

Commitments often fall short when made hastily or without clear terms, sometimes due to conflict avoidance or a hope to stay flexible. To create true accountability, all alignment work from Steps 1 and 2 should culminate in documented agreements that define mutual commitments with absolute clarity. As Jeff Bezos puts it, a strong agreement should resonate with such clarity "it's like angels singing from up high".

Part 2: Deepen Personal Connections

It is crucial to get to know the human behind the role. Roles may change, they may need to be discussed. But human connection is the lifeblood that makes organisations work. There are two easy ways to strengthen human connection in teams.

Share personal stories

Let team members take turns and share stories about themselves. Little-known facts from their personal lives. They do not even have to connect to work; ultimately, they should serve to connect the team members to each other.

Use structured asssessments

I love to use simple personality assessments to connect teams based on their behaviours. It is less important which assessment you use than how much time you spend discussing the 'so what'? I currently use Hogan Assessments because they are relatively affordable and scientifically validated. Here is how I share them with the team:

• Every team member receives their results individually. I normally debrief those with my clients.
• Then, every team member explains their profile to the rest of the team. During the presentation, the team members take notes on where these profiles create interesting tensions and resonance with their own profiles.
• After a short break, the team moves into a 1:1 speed-dating rotation where they all spend some time discussing their functional intersections, how their profiles might create friction or momentum and what to do about it.
• Finally, the team members present some of the key insights to share learnings with fellow team members and inspire further reflection.