THE OWNERSHIP GAP — PART ONE No Organ Works Alone
One of the easiest mistakes to make when looking at an organisation is to see it as a collection of jobs. As a CEO, I see something different. I see a system. A human being is made up of organs that perform different functions, but the body does not experience them as isolated departments. The heart pumps blood. The lungs exchange oxygen. The kidneys regulate what must be retained and what must leave. The brain coordinates. The muscles move. Each organ has its own job, but the purpose of the system is not for each organ to proudly announce that it has completed its own job. The purpose is for the body to remain alive and function properly.
One of the easiest mistakes to make when looking at an organisation is to see it as a collection of jobs. As a CEO, I see something different. I see a system.
A human being is made up of organs that perform different functions, but the body does not experience them as isolated departments. The heart pumps blood. The lungs exchange oxygen. The kidneys regulate what must be retained and what must leave. The brain coordinates. The muscles move. Each organ has its own job, but the purpose of the system is not for each organ to proudly announce that it has completed its own job. The purpose is for the body to remain alive and function properly.
Organisations work in much the same way.
Finance manages money. Operations delivers the service. Marketing creates demand. Sales converts demand into revenue. Customer service handles the customer experience. Human Resources manages people and systems. IT keeps the digital machinery running. If each department were evaluated only by whether it completed its assigned activity, we could have an organisation in which everybody is busy and the organisation is still failing. This is where the Ownership Gap begins.
Imagine the lungs telling the heart, “Oxygen has been delivered. My assignment is complete.” The heart cannot respond, “Excellent. I will handle the rest.” The organs are interdependent. What happens in one part affects another.
The same thing happens at work. A marketing team can deliver a campaign on schedule, but if the campaign attracts the wrong customers, the business has a problem. A sales representative can make the required number of calls, but if customers are being promised something the operations team cannot deliver, the organisation has a problem. A finance officer can process a payment correctly, but if the payment reaches the wrong account, the fact that the transaction was processed does not make the outcome successful.
The task was completed.
The system still has a problem.
This distinction is not merely managerial intuition. Organisational research has long recognised the importance of experienced responsibility for work outcomes. Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model, tested across 658 employees working in 62 jobs in seven organisations, identified experienced responsibility for outcomes as one of the psychological states connected to effective work behaviour. Their model also shows why job design matters: autonomy, task identity, task significance and feedback can shape whether employees experience their work as something for which they are genuinely responsible.
Another study makes the organisational-system argument even clearer. Pearce and Gregersen examined 290 healthcare and administrative employees across two hospitals and found that task interdependence was related to extra-role behaviour through employees' felt responsibility. In simple terms, when people's work depended on one another, the way they experienced responsibility mattered to how they behaved beyond the narrow boundaries of their assigned task.
This is why, when I look at an employee's work, I am interested in more than whether the person completed the item on the checklist.
I want to know whether the person understood where that item went next.
A blood cell does not receive applause for successfully travelling around the body if it never delivers oxygen where it is needed. That would be a very efficient blood cell with questionable career prospects. The same principle applies in an organisation.
The employee with the Ownership Gap often operates at the level of the task. “I sent the email.” “I prepared the report.” “I uploaded the document.” “I made the call.”
The employee demonstrating ownership is thinking one step further: “Did the email produce the response we needed?” “Does the report answer the question management needs answered?” “Is the document actually usable by the person receiving it?” “Did the call resolve the customer's problem?”
That is not necessarily doing somebody else's job.
It is understanding one's place in the system.
And this is where Part Two begins.
Because if an organisation is a system of interdependent parts, ownership cannot be demanded from employees while the organisation itself is designed to encourage fragmentation. A CEO cannot tell every employee to “take ownership” while giving people no autonomy, no useful feedback, no understanding of how their work affects others and no clarity about the outcome they are supposed to produce.
The body cannot complain about the leg for not running when the brain has never told it where to go. The question, therefore, is not simply whether employees have ownership.
It is also whether the organisation has created the conditions in which ownership can exist.