My wife and I were recently discussing an article she found about education in Finland. One of the points that was called out was a shared sense of ownership that the faculty had for each student:
“Everyone owned each student,” Walker says. “In the U.S., we would be, ‘He’s in Mrs. Smith’s class.’ In Denmark and Finland, the ownership was by the entire faculty. They felt responsible, and the learning was more individualized.”
It struck me that I see those sort of competing viewpoints in the workplace as well. Very often it is tempting for team members to treat a request or a challenge as something that should be somebody else’s problem. We have defined roles that we are aligned within, and success is often measured by specific achievements within these roles. If I am a writer on a project, and the client is not happy with an image being used, I may not feel any sense of ownership for that issue and let the appropriate creative team deal with it instead.
The best teams that I have been a part of have a shared sense of responsibility. It requires incredible trust among the entire team, with reduced egos, and it fosters a great sense of collaboration. The roles are not defined by specific tasks. The roles represent experience and skills that we each bring to the table, but it is the team in its entirety that has the responsibility of successful completion of all tasks, specifically the main task – deliver a quality product to the client. We all need to take ownership for any request, any issue, any failure that may happen along the way and do our best to bring the product to its finest conclusion.
As the article further illustrates (“Flynn says teachers focus less on data-driven decisions and more on differentiated instruction—partly the result of high-quality teachers, and partly because they know their students better.”), by everyone taking an active part in the overall project we will intrinsically know the details of the work, beyond any status reports or briefs that may be written. Knowing enough about the components that comprise the final product gives us the ability to react dynamically to change as a group, with feedback from everyone on the team for a creative solution that may not have been possible in a traditional setup of separate teams.
The corporate world cannot be compared directly to the world of secondary school, but I do think it is beneficial to consider the motivation provided to team members on a project, and to enable the team to work in an honest way to reach success. Allow lines to be gray, encourage transparency, and foster a true team attitude to rise above the limitations an individualistic mindset can impose.
Originally published 9/15/2014