People try harder when it’s theirs; their project, their plan, their decisions. This simple point is lost on most managers.

Managers befuddled by their team’s lack of productivity, attention to quality and innovation often have only themselves to blame. These managers are not providing their team members with enough ownership and, perhaps, just as importantly, they are not providing their people with enough public credit for their achievements.

Most successful managers instinctively realize two critical things:

1. Success means you have to stop doing and start managing

   Successful managers have to stop doing the job their team does, and realize their new job as a manager is to get their team to function well, get their team to make decisions, and get their team to take ownership. To use a sports analogy, successful managers stop being a player and start becoming a coach. To use a Sopranos analogy, they stop shooting and start ordering hits.

   This is an incredibly difficult transition for most people to make. They earned their promotions because they were good knowledge workers, successful team players, and have a history of capably executing. Most new managers tend to continue demonstrating those same behaviors.

2. Managing well means motivating, which means transferring ownership, knowledge and control

   Compensation explains why your team shows up. Praise and ownership explain why your team works hard.
   Successful managers realize that publicly praising their team is not giving others the glory, as much as it is showing the world what a good job they did managing the productive team and creating the conditions to succeed.

   Giving a sense of ownership is harder to accomplish. Amongst other things, giving a team a sense of ownership means transferring control over how goals get accomplished. Beyond concerns over the quality of the work product, when managers are truly honest with themselves, they worry that their teams do not have the necessary tools required to get the job done independently. Specifically, managers worry that they team lacks the required network of connections, a full set of information and the ability to communicate across the organization.

The net impact of these two realizations is often summed up with an obscure reference to “empowering” employees. Empowering your team means giving them the freedom and ownership to do the job their way. It also means very publicly giving them the credit when they succeed. Thus, it means giving them the reins.

For many managers, these notions of surrendering control are ridiculous (or perhaps more honestly, terrifying). However, every young executive must eventually take this kind of step to demonstrate his or her ability to run larger teams, collections of teams and eventually to take on a senior executive role. Because you can’t do it all yourself, you have to figure out how to make other people do parts the job for you at the quality standard you would expect of your own work.

Giving every member of your team control over group communication and knowledge transference tools is one of the best ways to create an environment where employees feel ownership.