Trust, Freedom and Ownership

We often tell people that we want them to take ownership, solve problems and use their judgement. I think most leaders genuinely mean it.

But I have been thinking about what we are really agreeing to when we say that.

If we give people genuine freedom to make decisions, they are not always going to make the decision we would have made. Sometimes their judgement will be different from ours.

And sometimes they will get it wrong.

That does not mean mistakes should be celebrated. Some mistakes have serious consequences, and there are decisions where freedom quite rightly needs to be limited by engineering, controls, standards or clear boundaries.

But I have started to wonder what happens when our response to every mistake is to reduce freedom.

What Freedom Taught Me

I have been lucky enough during my career to work for leaders who gave me room.

They allowed me to learn, question things and try something different. They also allowed me to make mistakes along the way.

Looking back, I think that freedom influenced me more than I realised at the time.

It helped me build confidence, but perhaps more importantly, it made me think. I had to understand why something worked rather than simply whether I had followed the instructions.

I learned when things worked, but I probably learned more when they didn't, and I had to work out why.

I was still accountable when I got something wrong. Being given that freedom didn't change that. I knew the decisions were mine, and so were the consequences of making them.

That experience has probably influenced how I think about leadership now. It has also made me conscious of how easily we can ask people to take ownership while gradually removing their freedom to do so.

What Happens After Someone Gets It Wrong?

This is where I think leadership gets interesting.

Someone makes a mistake, and naturally we respond. We try to understand what happened, prevent something similar from happening again and decide whether anything needs to change.

Sometimes it absolutely does.

But there is another response that can happen almost without us noticing.

We add another approval. Require another signature. Move a decision further up the organisation. Add another rule or another check.

Each change can make perfect sense when considered on its own. We are responding to something that happened and trying to stop it happening again.

The strange thing is that nobody has to make a conscious decision to remove ownership. It can happen one perfectly reasonable decision at a time.

It is only when we look at what has accumulated that we realise how much freedom has disappeared.

A person who was previously trusted to make a decision now needs approval. Someone who could solve a problem themselves now needs to escalate it. A team that once had room to adapt becomes increasingly dependent on somebody else telling them what they are allowed to do.

Eventually we can create an environment where making no decision feels safer than making the wrong one.

Then we wonder why people don't take ownership.

Freedom Is Not the Absence of Boundaries

I don't think the alternative is simply to give everyone complete freedom and hope for the best.

There are decisions where the potential consequences of getting something wrong mean we need strong boundaries. There are things we should engineer out, activities requiring specialist knowledge, and circumstances where verification or approval is important.

Trusting people does not remove the need for good systems.

The question for me is where those boundaries should sit.

If someone has the knowledge and capacity to make a reasonable decision within the normal conditions of their work, how much room do we give them to make it?

And what happens when that decision isn't perfect?

That second question interests me increasingly because it shifts some of our attention away from trying to create perfect human decision-making.

People aren't going to make the right decision every time.

So perhaps we should also be asking:

Can the system absorb a reasonable mistake without it becoming harm, failure or another excuse to remove freedom?

What Can the System Absorb?

This is where the idea becomes wider than empowerment.

If a system needs every person to make exactly the right decision every time, I'm not sure how resilient that system really is.

People will get things wrong occasionally, even when they are capable and trying to make a good decision. Two people can look at the same situation and reasonably reach different conclusions. And hindsight has a habit of making the better decision look far more obvious than it was at the time.

We should still learn from those situations.

Sometimes we will discover that the boundary was in the wrong place. Perhaps a particular decision shouldn't depend on individual judgement at all. Maybe the consequence is too significant, the information isn't readily available, or the system needs stronger control.

But sometimes we may discover something different.

The person made a perfectly understandable mistake, and the system simply had no room for it.

That is worth knowing too.

If a reasonable human mistake immediately becomes a serious failure, then improving the person's decision-making might be only part of the answer.

We may also need to strengthen what surrounds them.

What Do We Mean When We Say We Trust People?

This is also where I have started questioning what I mean when I say I trust people.

I generally believe people want to do good work. I would rather begin there than design an organisation around the assumption that they cannot be trusted.

I have written before about what happens when people feel that their voice and contribution are genuinely valued. That question of what it really means to value someone's contribution has stayed with me.

But trusting someone doesn't mean pretending that capacity doesn't matter, or that every decision should sit with everyone.

Leadership still has to understand where the boundaries need to be and whether the system around the person can cope when judgement isn't perfect.

There is a difference between trusting somebody and simply hoping everything will work out.

I think good leadership needs to understand that difference.

Can You Own Something You Cannot Influence?

There is another question underneath all of this.

Can we genuinely ask somebody to take ownership if we never allow them to make meaningful choices?

If every important decision has already been made for them, every deviation requires permission, and every mistake results in another piece of freedom being removed, what exactly are we asking them to own?

Perhaps compliance.

But I'm not sure it is ownership.

Ownership has to involve some ability to influence what happens.

That means accepting something that can be uncomfortable for leaders. Someone else's judgement will not always produce the decision we would have made ourselves.

We can challenge their decision. We can ask why they made it. We can learn from it and strengthen the system where necessary. Accountability still matters.

But if every difference in judgement results in us taking the decision back, eventually we haven't empowered people at all.

We have simply allowed them to make decisions while we agree with them.

Trust, Freedom and Ownership

I increasingly think these ideas belong together, although I'm not convinced they form some neat leadership formula.

The connection is messier than that.

We can say we trust people while still controlling most of their decisions. We can talk about ownership while building approval processes that make genuine ownership increasingly difficult. Sometimes we give people freedom right up until the moment they use it in a way we didn't expect.

I'm certainly not arguing that people should have unlimited freedom. There are decisions I wouldn't leave entirely to individual judgement because getting them wrong matters too much. That is where boundaries and stronger controls still have their place.

But when somebody makes a reasonable mistake, I don't think our first response should automatically be to take another decision away from them.

I would rather understand what happened first. Did they have the information and capacity they needed? What did the situation look like when they made the decision? And perhaps most importantly for me, what happened between that decision and the eventual outcome?

Because people will make mistakes.

If our organisations only work when they don't, perhaps we have another problem.

Which leaves me with the question I have been thinking about:

How much freedom survives the first mistake?