Ownership Dies Between Departments

If Everything Comes Back to You, Ownership Is Already Dead

I was standing on an airfield in Portugal watching Canadian troops wait for buses that were not coming and military equipment sit motionless on the apron.

None of it made sense.

We were participating in a major multinational military exercise, and I was the senior Canadian logistics officer responsible for coordinating the movement of our troops and equipment into the country. Multiple allied nations were moving people, vehicles, and equipment through the same ports and airfields before dispersing across Portugal to their respective training areas.

Months of planning had gone into the operation. Movement tables had been built, timelines synchronized, responsibilities assigned, and coordination meetings held. Every organization knew where it was supposed to be, when it was supposed to be there, and what it had been tasked to do once it arrived.

I had expected to see a well-oiled machine.

Not a perfect one. Operations involving that many nations, organizations, and moving parts are never perfect. There are always delays, changes, and complications. But I expected the system to move.

Instead, it stalled.

Soldiers stood around waiting for transportation. Equipment remained on the airfield apron while the next organization waited for confirmation from someone else. Vehicles that should have been moving across the country sat parked because one part of the process had fallen behind.

From a distance, the operation looked busy. Radios were constantly transmitting. People moved quickly between locations. Meetings were taking place. Updates were being passed.

Everyone appeared fully engaged.

But very little was actually moving.

As the delays continued, my frustration built. I was the senior Canadian logistics officer on the ground. Whether every delay technically belonged to my organization or not, I knew how it would look if Canada became the nation clogging the system.

I also knew that explanations about which section had completed which task would mean very little to the nations waiting behind us.

This was not simply about Canada falling behind schedule. We were one nation among many using the same infrastructure. If we disrupted the movement flow, we would not only delay ourselves. We risked affecting the deployment plans of every allied nation scheduled to move behind us.

A Canadian problem could quickly become a coalition problem.

Frustration turned into anger.

Then anxiety.

I remember looking around and thinking, What the hell is going on? Why is nothing moving?

It was not a lack of effort. People were working.

It was not incompetence. The individuals involved were experienced professionals.

It was not laziness, indifference, or a refusal to follow instructions.

Then, during a discussion about yet another delay, someone said something that stopped me.

“We did exactly what we were tasked to do.”

At first, I was angry.

The operation was behind. Troops were waiting. Equipment was not moving. Our delays were beginning to threaten the wider multinational flow, and I was being told that everything had been done correctly.

But the more I thought about the statement, the more I realized the person was right.

Their team had done exactly what it had been directed to do.

So had almost everyone else.

Transport had completed its assigned tasks. Movement control had completed its assigned tasks. Operations had completed its assigned tasks. Logistics had completed its assigned tasks.

Every organization could point to its checklist and honestly say, “We did our part.”

Yet the operation itself was not succeeding.

There are moments in leadership when something you have believed for years suddenly stops making sense.

Hearing that sentence was one of mine.

We had not built a system where people owned the mission.

We had built a system where people owned individual tasks.

Everyone was responsible for a piece.

No one felt responsible for the outcome.

The difference sounds subtle.

It is not.

Activity Is Not Ownership

That mindset does not remain on an airfield in Portugal.

I have seen the same pattern in military headquarters, corporate boardrooms, executive teams, growing businesses, and public organizations.

Sales says it delivered the client.

Operations says it fulfilled the order.

Finance says it issued the invoice.

Customer service says it responded to the complaint.

Every function can defend its activity while the customer remains frustrated, the project remains late, and the organization misses the larger outcome.

Everyone completed their part.

Nobody owned the result.

This is why busy teams can still be low-ownership teams.

Activity proves that people are working. It does not prove that anyone feels responsible for making the whole system succeed.

A person can complete every task assigned to them without becoming personally invested in whether the larger objective is achieved. They can attend every meeting, submit every report, meet every deadline, and still remain detached from the final result.

The problem becomes especially visible when work crosses boundaries.

One team completes its task and passes the work onward. The next team waits for confirmation. Another group assumes someone else is coordinating the handoff. The moment the process breaks between responsibilities, everyone pauses.

Someone else is supposed to fix it.

Someone else is supposed to make the decision.

Someone else is supposed to notice that the system is no longer flowing.

That is where ownership often dies inside an organization.

Not because people do not care, but because the system has taught them that their responsibility ends at the edge of their role.

Their task is theirs.

The larger outcome belongs to someone else.

Accountability and Ownership Begin in Different Places

For a long time, I thought what I had witnessed was an accountability problem.

I was wrong.

Accountability and ownership are related, but they begin in different places.

Accountability starts with an external commitment. A responsibility is assigned, expectations are established, and performance can be reviewed.

Ownership becomes internal.

The individual does not simply accept responsibility for completing the assigned work. They become personally invested in whether the larger outcome succeeds.

Accountability can make someone answer for a result.

Ownership makes them care enough to influence it before they are ever asked.

Accountability asks, “Did you complete what you were assigned?”

Ownership asks, “Did we accomplish what we set out to achieve?”

That does not mean everyone should interfere in every decision. It does not mean ignoring chains of command, bypassing processes, or operating beyond your authority.

It means people understand that their work exists in service of something larger.

Their role may have boundaries.

Their concern for the mission should not.

An ownership-minded employee does not ignore a problem simply because it technically belongs to another department. They raise it. They investigate it. They involve the right people. They help create movement.

They do not say, “That is not my responsibility,” when the larger outcome is clearly at risk.

They ask, “What needs to happen next, and how can I help make it happen?”

Ownership Often Dies Between Departments

Leaders often search for ownership inside individual employees when the real problem sits between teams.

Nobody owns the handoff.

Nobody is measured on the end-to-end result.

Each function succeeds according to its own scorecard while the wider system fails.

That was exactly what I saw in Portugal. Every organization had a role. Every organization had responsibilities. Every organization could explain what it had completed.

The failure lived in the space between them.

Fragmented ownership is often designed into a system long before it appears in people’s behaviour.

Roles are narrowly defined. Performance measures reward functional success. Decision authority remains unclear. Teams are told to protect their responsibilities without being equally responsible for what happens between them.

At that point, telling one employee to “take more ownership” will not solve the problem.

The organization must examine how ownership, authority, and success are defined across the work.

Who owns the final outcome?

Who owns the handoffs?

Who is responsible when the individual parts are working but the full system is not?

One person owning the outcome does not mean everyone else becomes indifferent.

Singular ownership creates clarity about who ensures the objective remains coordinated. Shared commitment ensures contributors do not hide behind the limits of their roles.

The owner holds the whole picture.

Everyone else remains responsible for protecting it.

When the Leader Becomes the System

Leaders may inherit systems that fragment ownership, but we also reinforce them through our daily behaviour.

We say we want people to take initiative, then correct them whenever they do something differently than we would have done it.

We say we want stronger decision-making, then insist that every meaningful decision come through us.

We tell people to solve problems, then jump in the moment their solution becomes uncomfortable.

We ask for honesty, then punish the first person who brings us information we do not want to hear.

Over time, the team learns.

It learns that initiative is welcome only when it produces the leader’s preferred answer.

It learns that making a decision creates risk, while asking for permission transfers that risk upward.

It learns that the safest response is to wait.

Dependency rarely develops because a leader deliberately wants control over everything. It usually begins with efficiency.

You know the answer, so you provide it.

You have more experience, so you make the decision.

You want to protect the organization, so you retain the risk.

Each choice makes sense in isolation.

Together, they teach the team that thinking ends where your authority begins.

I saw this in myself when I became a Commanding Officer.

Issues would arrive at my desk that I believed should have been resolved several levels below me. My first reaction was frustration. Why were capable leaders bringing me problems they already had the experience to solve?

Eventually, I had to ask a harder question:

What had I done to teach them that bringing the problem to me was safer than making the decision themselves?

In some cases, the answer was uncomfortable.

I had stepped in too quickly.

I had corrected decisions because they were not the decisions I would have made.

I had unintentionally taught people that initiative was welcome only when it matched my preferred solution.

There is a certain satisfaction in being the leader who always has the answer. It feels productive. It feels important. Sometimes it even feels like strong leadership.

But every time you rescue someone from a problem they were capable of solving, you move ownership upward.

Eventually, people stop arriving with recommendations because the real decision belongs to you.

Projects wait for your calendar.

Routine issues become urgent when you are unavailable.

Your presence becomes the operating system.

At that point, being indispensable may feel like leadership.

In reality, it is often evidence that leadership has not been distributed.

What you have built is not strength.

It is organizational fragility.

Ownership Cannot Survive Fear

When mistakes are punished indiscriminately, people do not stop caring.

They redirect what they care about.

Instead of protecting the outcome, they protect themselves.

They document that they followed the process. They seek approval before acting. They avoid decisions that could later be questioned. They ensure responsibility can be traced somewhere else if things go wrong.

In that environment, “We did exactly what we were tasked to do” becomes more than an explanation.

It becomes self-defence.

People quickly learn what happens when someone makes a mistake.

Does the leader ask what happened, what the person understood at the time, and what should change?

Or does the leader immediately begin searching for blame?

Does the organization examine the system?

Or does it protect the system by sacrificing the individual?

Ownership still requires standards.

A careless violation of known expectations and a thoughtful decision that produces a poor result are not the same thing.

Leaders who cannot distinguish between them eventually create teams that choose inaction over judgment.

If the safest option is to wait for instructions, people will wait.

If raising a problem creates blame, people will hide problems.

If trying something new creates personal risk while following a flawed process creates none, people will follow the process.

That is not necessarily a character problem.

It may be a rational response to the environment leadership has created.

A team cannot own outcomes if it is afraid to act.

What the Organization Rewards Matters

Organizations often reward the exact behaviour that created the problem I saw in Portugal.

They measure whether each function completed its activity, not whether the work moved cleanly across the entire system.

They celebrate the team that worked all night to recover a crisis but overlook the person who redesigned the process so the crisis would not happen again.

They praise visible busyness, late nights, constant availability, and heroic recoveries while paying less attention to the quiet work of preventing failure.

The result is predictable.

People optimize their own task.

They protect their own metric.

They leave the gaps between departments for someone else to solve.

Ownership-driven employees do more than work hard.

They raise risks early.

They improve systems.

They challenge processes that no longer make sense.

They solve problems across boundaries.

They help peers succeed because they understand that the mission is larger than their individual performance.

This behaviour is often less dramatic than heroics.

It is also far more valuable.

People pay attention to what leadership rewards.

Reward busyness and you will get more activity.

Reward ownership and you will get more judgment, initiative, and responsibility.

The Ownership Diagnostic

You can usually see the level of ownership inside a team by answering five questions.

When work crosses departments, who owns the handoff?

When people bring problems upward, do they also bring a recommendation?

What important decisions stop when you are unavailable?

Are people rewarded for protecting their function or achieving the wider outcome?

When something fails, does the conversation begin with learning or blame?

Those answers reveal whether ownership is truly distributed or whether it remains concentrated at the top.

Another useful test is to imagine stepping away for two weeks.

Would work continue at roughly the same pace?

Would your team make the decisions it already knows need to be made?

Would people solve problems within their authority?

Would standards hold?

Or would projects begin to slow because everyone was waiting for you to return?

A team that cannot operate without you is not a high-performing team.

It is a dependent one.

Building Ownership Requires More Than a Speech

You do not create ownership by telling people to take ownership.

Most employees have heard that instruction before.

“Take more initiative.”

“Be more accountable.”

“Think like an owner.”

Those phrases sound good in meetings, but they rarely change behaviour because they do not address the environment around the person.

Ownership grows when leaders consistently create the conditions for it.

Clarify the outcome, not merely the work

Do not stop at assigning a task.

Explain what success looks like, why it matters, what standards apply, and how the work connects to the larger mission.

Make the handoffs clear.

Ensure people understand not only what they are expected to complete, but also what the organization is trying to accomplish.

Then identify who owns the final outcome.

Several teams may contribute. Multiple people may support. But someone must be able to say, “I own ensuring this succeeds.”

Match ownership with decision authority

You cannot hold someone responsible for an outcome while denying them the ability to make the decisions required to achieve it.

Responsibility without authority is not empowerment.

It is exposure.

Clarify what they can decide without you.

Define what risks they can accept.

Establish when they need to escalate.

Make it clear when they should bring a recommendation rather than a request for direction.

Then back them when they act inside the boundaries you gave them.

Nothing destroys ownership faster than giving someone authority and abandoning them the first time their decision becomes unpopular.

Change the conversation when problems move upward

When someone brings you a problem, resist the urge to answer immediately.

Ask:

What have you tried?

What options do you see?

What do you recommend?

What do you need from me?

You may still need to provide direction. Leadership is not passive.

But make the person think before you take the problem back.

Review the quality of the decision, not simply the final result. A good decision can produce a poor outcome. A poor decision can occasionally get lucky.

Help your people develop judgment, not merely compliance.

Start Where Work Stops

Do not begin by asking your team to show more ownership.

Begin by identifying where work stops.

Look for the project waiting on an approval everyone already knows will be granted.

Find the recurring issue that always returns to the same senior leader.

Examine the handoff where one department declares success while the next inherits confusion.

Identify the decision people already know how to make but do not believe they have the authority to take.

Then ask three questions:

Who owns the final outcome?

What decision authority does that person actually have?

What leadership behaviour is teaching everyone else to wait?

Ownership becomes easier to build when you stop treating it as an attitude problem and start treating it as a system-design problem.

What Happens When You Leave?

Every leader eventually leaves.

You get promoted, retire, or move into another organization. Life changes, and someone else takes your place.

When that happens, the true test of your leadership is not whether the team misses you.

It is whether the team can continue without you.

Will people keep making decisions?

Will they solve problems before they grow?

Will they protect the standards you worked to establish?

Will they keep moving the organization forward, or will the system slow down while everyone waits for the next leader to provide direction?

That is why I still think about the exercise in Portugal.

Every organization had completed its assigned work, yet troops were waiting, equipment was sitting on the airfield, and the mission was falling behind.

The failure did not come from a lack of activity.

It came from a system where responsibility ended at the edge of each task.

Ownership is not something you demand from people.

It is something your leadership makes possible.

So ask yourself:

If I stepped away for two weeks, what decisions would stop because I was no longer there?

Your answer will show you where ownership is missing.

Start there.

Where does ownership break down most often inside your team: at the decision, the handoff, or the moment something goes wrong?

If everything still comes back to you and you are ready to change that, a Leadership Clarity Call is a practical place to begin.