If your firm depends on someone carrying the operational layer alone, staff or outside partner, the question worth asking is not whether they are capable. The data says they almost certainly are. The question is whether the layer they are carrying was ever built on purpose, or whether it has just been getting absorbed, one gap at a time, by someone who has already proven they can do it the hard way.

A Guest Post from Jen Wasem, Jenerous Philanthropy.

Ownership is about being responsible for your role. It’s also about allowing others to be fully responsible for theirs.

If your team keeps asking who was supposed to do that, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a growing organization runs into, and it is rarely about effort

When the room does not know who owns something, the comfortable move is to talk about the tool. Naming the owner does three things: it tells the owner this is theirs, it tells everyone else it is not theirs, and it tells the system what to optimize for.

By the time the wall was full, more than a third of the sticky notes had nobody’s name on them. The work was happening; the accountability was not. Each departure leaves a quiet residue: the work the person was doing that was not in their job description, and the assumptions about who would do it next.