Give them authority they can actually use, and then stop solving the problems they are capable of solving. When a team member brings an issue, ask how they would resolve it. Ownership follows authority, and it is reinforced every time the leader redirects a question rather than answering it.
The most common failure I saw in my interviews was the manager who tells the team to take ownership of an outcome they have not been given the authority to influence. Ownership cannot be demanded. It is the natural consequence of holding real authority, and it withers the moment the authority turns out to be decorative. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, described the sequence to me plainly: never micromanage, give people ownership and responsibility of their roles, and the result is mutual trust, with a team that looks after guests and the business as if both were their own.
So the first answer is structural. The front desk agent who can move a guest to another room without paging anyone owns that guest’s experience. The line cook who can pull a plate that does not meet the standard owns that plate. Take away the authority and you take away the ownership with it, whatever the all staff meeting says.
The second answer is a habit of conversation. Kai Speth, then general manager of The Reverie Saigon, named the specific verbal move that turns trained staff into owners. When a team member brings a problem, the instinct of most leaders is to solve it. Speth pushes it back. How would you solve it?
“Empower your team to not only identify challenges, but to also propose solutions. When an issue is resolved in this way, instead of from top down, there is a much higher chance of success.” Kai Speth, then general manager of The Reverie Saigon
The redirect is small and its cumulative effect is large. A team member who is answered every time they bring a question will, over a year, bring more questions. A team member whose first question was met with “how would you solve it?” will, by the third, arrive with a proposed solution already attached. Eventually they stop bringing the easy questions at all and reserve the leader’s time for the ones that genuinely warrant it. That is what ownership looks like in daily practice: a team that has learned the leader expects a proposal, and brings one.
This habit requires patience, and the chefs were as clear about that as the hoteliers. Emma Bengtsson of Aquavit in New York described two halves of a single discipline. The first is being open to any question, however silly, because that is how she finds the way each person learns. The second is knowing when to stop answering.
“The feeling of accomplishment for being able to achieve something on your own is one of the greatest tools of motivation.” Emma Bengtsson, chef, Aquavit, New York
A leader who delivers only the first half produces a team that has learned to ask and never to act. A leader who delivers only the second half produces a team that has learned to do neither. Ownership comes from the combination: the patience to receive the question and the restraint to redirect it.
There is a third element, and it is the one most operators skip. Ownership survives only if the first mistake is handled well. When an empowered decision goes wrong, the leader has three options. Revoke the authority. Forgive publicly while quietly tightening the leash with “just check with me next time.” Or absorb the cost, treat the conversation as a private teaching moment, and reaffirm that the authority still stands. Only the third preserves ownership. The first two produce a team that, within three months, is routing every decision back through the leader.
Watch your pronouns, too. A leader who says “we got that right” after a success and “they got that wrong” after a failure has told the team that credit travels up and blame travels down. Reverse the pronouns and ownership becomes safe to hold.
Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, works through the redirect, the patience it demands, the recovery conversation and the pronoun test, and closes Part I of the book on the leader as a person.