Ownership Quotient

As we know Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the activities one performs in personal and professional life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is no end to reach final level of excellence. It is a journey and results depend on how one undertakes it.  In one of the previous articles in the blog, we saw how “Say-Do ratio” of a person affects the results one achieves in this journey. We also discussed about “Just Do it” mantra which helps in getting definite results. We also deliberated on “Allowing the people to perform” to achieve effective results. These are various tools and approaches which are available for usage in the journey of excellence.  However there is one critical thing which determines the quality of results i.e. what kind of ownership you have accorded to the actions when you have initiated them.

Whenever we talk about the excellence journey, it always involves assessment of certain aspects of oneself / organization and identify an intervention which, when implemented, will take oneself / organization to the higher level of excellence. Key here is effective implementation of the intervention. There is a possibility that you take certain actions because either you believe in them or it can be because your superiors believe in them or you might just want to be politically correct or something similar. Your ownership towards the need of specific action is different in each case and thus the effectiveness of the execution; which gives a specific result. It is seen that the ownership level of action is directly proportional to the results one achieve in this journey.

When you own certain decision / action, your commitment towards its successful implementation increases automatically and you try to find solutions to the problems anticipated during implementation in contrast to give reasons or finding rationale to say why certain hurdle can not be surpassed. The ownership level determines the attitude that you would be taking in performing any task that you set to do and higher the ownership more positive attitude you will adopt resulting in more effective results. So ask yourself, what is your “Ownership Quotient”; i.e. the ratio of key actions that you take with complete ownership to total number of key actions you take. Higher the ratio better will be effectiveness of your actions and you will be travelling at a good speed in the journey of excellence. We should mentally calculate our ratio and every time we find that it is coming down, it is time for us to look at how we are deciding the key actions that we take as intervention.