The Ownership Trait in IT Staffing

In the challenge to find and retain the best employees within an IT organization, there are many recommended practices, from putting developers through a brief coding test, to verifying that project managers posses a solid understanding of accepted methodologies. Prior work experience is matched against the organization’s current challenges, while education and references are checked.

In all this paperwork and the gauntlet of interviews that ensue, I’d propose that an authentic and visible sense of ownership is perhaps the single most valuable differentiator between multiple candidates of equal measure. Why?

An Owner:

• Doesn’t mentally punch out at 5 p.m. only to punch back in at 9 a.m. the next morning. This isn’t about being tied to one’s Blackberry or living on 4 hours sleep, rather that an owner is constantly open to new information that might impact his organization: the news story or magazine article one comes across, something overheard at a party, that idea in the shower, etc. All these items are noted and brought into the organization to improve products or operations.
• Takes steps to fix service and product failures, even if they are found well outside one’s area of responsibility. Being swamped with issues to manage within IT (the normal status) does not become an excuse to let items fester or go unreported to other parts of the organization (“someone else must be dealing with that – I hope”).
• Makes investments and negotiates with vendors as if the money spent was one’s own. How would the investment wish list change in your organization if you were making these purchases out of your own small business, and the return on investment had an impact on your own bottom-line for the year? Would the games that routinely occur in larger organizations with sky-high ROI claims become a thing of the past?
• Represents the company after-hours in a constructive and positive manner, whether it is at a large party, among close friends or in response to a negative news story about the organization.

My experience with owners is that they join an organization with this trait as the default behavior, right out of the gate. In other words, they may stop being owners based on the bad behavior of the organization or through sheer frustration over time, but they are not likely to join an organization as non-owners and magically find that trait later on.

Furthermore, a missing skill can be remedied and education courses can be taken,  but a sense of ownership is not gained by an employee as the result of a two-day seminar. In fact, those with a strong ownership trait are the ones most likely to identify new skills needed and make the personal investment of time necessary to acquire them.

The most impressive work experience and pedigree doesn’t mean much if the “that’s not my job” mentality is the implicit attitude of your employees. This ownership trait isn’t the exclusive role of senior management – you may notice it on display by an eager summer intern, while it is severely lacking within a long-tenured VP in the same organization.

Yet we keep hearing that because of aggressive outsourcing and the increasing tendency of organizations to lay off staff in roller-coaster fashion at the first sign of a downturn (or to make the quarterly numbers), ownership and loyalty to any organization are therefore rapidly disappearing. Indeed we may be viewed as naive to expect it at all.

Do you agree that a sense of ownership is a key differentiator in the hiring process? As leaders, how can we cultivate this trait among our teams?

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Tagged as: Hiring, IT Staffing, Management & Governance