How To Give Every Employee A Personal Stake In Your Company

If you’re a business owner, you want your employees to feel as personally invested in the company as you do–but you probably know that isn’t likely. Still, your management strategy can have a huge impact on how deeply invested your employees feel in the work you do together. And getting everyone on your team to think and feel as passionately as you do isn’t as hard as it sounds. All Hands on Deck As an owner, your business is your baby. You watch over it obsessively. You make choices based solely on what’s best for it, even if that means pain in the short term. But I’ve been through the battles of running a business for 30 years, working with baby boomers and millennials, fax machines and iPhones. The most pervasive lesson learned through all those years was simple: Running a business is not a one-person job. You have to share the load. Teach your team that when the company does well, everyone does well. If you try to do everything, not only will you exhaust yourself, but you’ll risk your staff–either intentionally or accidentally–pulling in the other direction. If it begins to look like the boss can handle everything, no one else will feel their own work is mission-critical. They’ll feel unimportant, and your whole team’s enthusiasm and investment will flag. Instead, make it known that you all share the same objectives, and it takes every single person’s contribution in order to achieve them. Driving the Business Forward Employees often want to take more personal ownership for the companies they work for, but leaders don’t usually have the time and energy to teach their entire staff what it takes to run a successful business–let [...]