An Ownership Mentality
Entrepreneurs have an ownership mentality. An awareness that the buck starts and stops with them. This truth underpins many aspects of the experience of creating a business from scratch.
It is all yours. You are responsible. You emotionally own commitments to your co-founders, your team, your customers, your investors, your suppliers, your stakeholders. This is the ownership mentality. An owner takes responsibility for outcomes and is self-empowered to make the decisions that will lead to those outcomes. Successful founders and entrepreneurial CEOs have this sense of ownership — and all that flows from it. Sometimes, within a startup, leaders will assume it within a specific domain.
The ownership mentality means taking responsibility. This is what is expected of the owner, the ultimate authority and holder of ultimate responsibility. Whatever it takes to solve the problem(s), to figure out an answer. There are no limits. If it is needed, even if you have no idea what a workable solution might be, you have just to begin and work it out. The buck stops with you — and whether you know how to solve the emergent problem or not, you must jump into the deep end of the pool and start swimming/trying. It may mean defining the problem. It may mean solving it directly. It may mean putting systems in place to solve it systemically. It can even mean deciding not to solve it and accepting the consequences. Delegation does not absolve you of the responsibility because it may mean ensuring that the team whose responsibility the problem falls under executes appropriately. It may mean dealing with the escalation as needed. It may mean taking responsibility for whatever happened, whether you were directly involved or not, and reaching out to apologize and make amends, owning the thing the organization did or did not do.
The ownership mentality is the ultimate mindset of the initiator. It is the thing that drives entrepreneurs to initiate. To be comprehensive in their point of view. To see and to act. And it is that very act of looking at the entire picture, exploring different approaches, and finally making a call (big bets) on what actions to take and to be accountable for the consequences that defines an owner’s mentality.
Honestly, not everyone wants this. It means being on-call all the time. Owners do not ever get to unplug totally because things that happen do not come during business hours. You must be responsive whenever adversity appears. Do not found if you do not want to own it. The burden is sometimes very weighty. Make sure your spouse knows before you embark on the path. This is what I try to communicate to potential founders who come asking for advice on whether they should take the plunge. I try hard to talk them out of it with doses of reality. Frankly, if I can succeed in persuading them not to do it, they likely do not have the necessary grit, tenacity, and commitment. I often fail to convince them – and that is a hallmark of the willingness to put themselves into the crucible. To tackle the steep learning curve, the intense accountability, the need to perceive reality and synthesize a path forward.
Many people do not understand an ownership mentality. When I was an intern early in my career, a much older individual at the large organization I was working for asked me to lunch to declare in no uncertain terms that, “Most people are not like you! I just want to be left alone to do my job during the workday. I do not want to think about how what I do impacts others, nor do I want to think about my work when I am away from my desk.” It was an eye-opening moment to realize that, for many in the world, work is not their passion and focus – and they do not want to take on broader responsibilities. Just hand over the paycheck and leave me alone. In the decades since that conversation, it has been repeated in various forms, or I hear echos in the confusion that some express about why I cannot just ask my boss (who is that exactly?) for time off away from work or look at me blankly when I take ownership for solving a problem that I may or may not have the “proper” expertise or experience to solve. They think the answer is just to ask someone else to do it. One of my newer co-founders remarked that, after a couple of years in our startup, that the thing that surprised him most about being part of a startup is that it is often not possible just to go get someone else, someone with the right expertise, to do the thing that needs doing. That, unlike his previous experiences in large organizations, where there always seemed to be somebody whose job it was to specifically do what needed doing, in a startup, it was often all of us looking around at each other and trying to figure out what to do next to solve the problem at hand. He had learned what it means to have that ownership mentality.
Entrepreneurial leadership is often lonely because the ownership mentality can be discouragingly rare. When I want to find others who understand my world and my point of view, the ownership mentality is often the common thread that helps me connect and feel understood by fellow founders/entrepreneurial CEOs. Even when we are pursuing wildly different businesses, we can relate to each other on that level. We can share this feeling that everything falls on our shoulders, even those things we delegate. We can share the constant conviction that, as owners, it is ultimately our responsibility to ensure that the goals, resources, and execution are carried out effectively.
