Business Owner Mentality

Executives often aspire to have employees who think and act more like business owners. Many have launched employee empowerment programs to accomplish this. However, what they find out is that instilling such a mindset is easier said than done. They quickly realize that empowerment, without effective control and coordination, can lead to chaos and ultimately, poor performance.

Establishing a Business Owner Mentality requires one fundamental step that is often overlooked. People must be given a business to run. One with clearly defined outcomes, where the balance between conflicting cost, service and quality objectives is actively managed. Rewarding employees on the ability to balance these “tradeoffs,” provides the basis to promote collaboration and a collective sense of responsibility across functional and organization boundaries.

The capabilities that address the “Dynamic Strategy” and “Customer Focus” challenges are the same ones that provide the foundation for a Business Owner Mentality. But what is really important is how these capabilities are implemented. One thing that must be remembered is that making changes to how organizations are managed is 80% emotional and 20% technical; not the other way around. Our holistic implementation and change approach ensures that employees believe:

• They will benefit from the change
• Management is serious about making the change
• Management is capable of successfully executing it
• The change program is fundamentally different than others that failed