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This entire article serves to describe and detail the effectiveness of implementing a philosophy of shared leadership involving the practices of accountability, ownership, empowerment and communication.

Ownership

Relational Team Incentives and ownership

Employee ownership is a strategy and philosophy that enables employees to make decisions about their jobs. Employee ownership helps employees own their work and take responsibility for their results. Employee ownership helps employees serve customers at the level of the organization where the customer interface exists.

Those who have experienced first hand the power of employee ownership believe whole-heartedly that economic growth, employee well-being and dignity, and success of the business enterprise are common characteristics of theoretical employee ownership in companies.

There is nothing magic about employee ownership. Employee ownership does not guarantee success, nor prevent or cure business problems. But it does stand to reason, and experience and research have shown, that employee ownership has a different attitude about the company, their job, and their responsibilities that makes them work more effectively, and increases the likelihood that their company will be successful. Fundamentally, employee owners are more accountable for their job performance – and their fellow workers’ job performance – simply because they feel they have a common stake in the success of their company. It’s a simple formula: if employees perform extraordinarily well company performance is more likely to be extraordinary, and that translates into high performance for the employees. Someone once said, ownership is a powerful incentive for ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

But not everyone is aware of this power. Even some employee owned companies have not realized the full potential of employee ownership. This is not a matter of employees just owning stock but rather employee ownership at work.

Stockholders alone do not build companies – employees build companies and employee owners build great companies.

Communication

The terms, as used in this instance, refers to communication and feedback from bosses, peers, and those junior to you. It is sometimes referred to as “multi-source feedback.” An individual seeks feedback about his or her performance at work from a variety of colleagues with the aim of using it to highlight areas of strength and those in need of improvement. The method evolved as the limitations of the more traditional “top down” appraisal became apparent—namely, that it was perceived as unfair, biased, limited to one person’s perspective (usually the boss), and often demotivating. A “360°” appraisal has the potential to overcome these problems.

“360°” appraisal can be used for two broad purposes — to make decisions about pay and promotion (performance management) and to determine how people are developing their skills and competencies. Because of the potential for bias, most organizations no longer use it for performance management and recognize it as a developmental tool. It is designed to look at the behaviors (or competencies) that are key to a job including teamwork, communication, managing others, and interpersonal skills. As the business culture has moved towards looking not only at what people do but how they do it, 360° appraisal provides a way of measuring relevant behaviors. It generally does not include many items on technical or clinical skills as there are other ways of measuring these.

This article has six (6) parts in its entirety. Part five (5) of this article is entitled “Managing Everybody Else: Shared Leadership – Implementation”.

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