Jim Rohn, a leading expert in the domain of personal mastery, said, “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you,” yet you see gym-goers putting complete responsibility of their well being on the gym-trainer. They want instant miracles to happen when they hire a personal coach. What they forget is that the coach can only act as a facilitator and you are the one who has to do the pushups and crunches and lift weights every day. The coach can give you a diet plan, but you must follow it to see results. Many people join the gym but very few continue going. They don’t see the results and hence they give up. It is not the gym or the coach or the diet plan that makes people get results, but it is their own personal effort that makes all the difference. This is called ownership – when you take complete responsibility for the results you get.

A lack of ownership is a major cause of failures in several relationships, where partners believe that the other person must change in order to make the relationship work. Lack of ownership is seen at the workplace where people pass the buck and do only what is instructed. I am more than surprised when I see people not taking ownership when it comes to their own lives. They let other people’s opinions influence what’s possible for them and they let the naysayers influence how they respond to an opportunity.

At work it is common to hear employees make statements like, “I can only do this much,”
or, “My job ends here,” or, “I do only what I’m told to,” and even, “I am not the one who owns it.” When you come across such employees, you can instantly tell a lot about an organization. Such organizations are run by fear instead of faith, you can feel low levels of trust internally where people are passing the buck, and you can also see how the organization is micromanaged instead of being led by a positive vision. That is not a good sign for any company in the globalized world. The organization’s costs shoot up when an employee doesn’t take ownership of a customer complaint. The organization suffers when the vendors withdraw because of the bureaucratic structure of approvals. The organization bleeds when an employee doesn’t go the extra mile to produce quality products. The organization gets drained financially when people keep passing the buck instead of getting things done.

Are you excited to know how to foster a culture of ownership in your organization? Are you willing to make a turnaround in your own personal life?

Discover powerful ways to live a life of ownership in part 2. Read the part 2 here If It Is To Be, It Is Up To Me