Breaking Free from the Inertia Trap: How to Get Your Team Members to Take Ownership
This is part two of my article series about getting your team members to take more ownership by breaking out of the inertia trap.
Part one is “Understanding the Inertia Trap: Why Your Team Members Don’t Take Ownership” and covered:
An Inertia Trap is when teams/organizations get stuck, often without knowing it. Even though competent team members and leaders are present, whenever issues arise, there’s a noticeable absence of proactive action, taking charge, or taking ownership in addressing problems or taking charge of situations.
Symptoms of an inertia trap include lack of initiative, unclear expectations, a divisive “us vs them”-mentality, low feedback, and low accountability.
An inertia trap occurs often due to a mix of rapid change, social dynamics like group cohesion, high ambiguity and absence of knowledge, differences in viewpoints, and work overload.
Whether it's the 'us vs them' mentality or a reluctance to step up in challenging situations, these symptoms hinder team collaboration and overall success. In case you’re hearing yourself or a colleague say similar things, here are steps you can take to help your organization break free from the trap.
Getting Out of an Inertia Trap Starts with You
First of all: As a leader, no matter your level, there’s no such thing as “your problem” and “my problem.” That’s the whole point of leadership, and I can’t overstate how important this is.
Our job as leaders is to:
Notice challenges or opportunities for our business and
Make sure those get addressed
I know, it’s always so simple in theory!
So how do you get there? I’ve been working with many leadership teams on this, and the best tip I have for you is – Culture is the behaviors that we reward and punish, so: Lead with the behaviors you want to see in others.
1. Understand what’s led you to the inertia trap
You will get drastically better results if you can target your actions to fix the issues that are showing up as inertia. Even if it’s tempting to ignore, I recommend putting on your detective hat to figure out what’s causing it.
Check if you’re accidentally contributing to inertia
This is the slightly awkward, but really important step, and bear with me for it: Despite our best intentions, most of us will do things that inadvertently cause even more inertia. I’ve certainly been guilty of this, and maybe you find yourself in one or more of these common examples of leaders accidentally causing more inertia. As always, these behaviors are problematic once they become a pattern:
“Hero mode”: In effort to salvage a situation, you activate “hero mode” and jump in to save the day. This may be when a project goes off track, a customer complains, or when incidents occur.
Micromanaging: Doing others’ work yourself, including when you’ve initially delegated those tasks.
Bypassing people and structures to get things done: Instead of cascading information through your managers and leads, giving them a chance to tailor it to their teams, you communicate directly with your skip-levels. Or instead of using the process to get approval for a purchase, you skip it.
And even though we do these things because, after all, we want to solve problems for the organization, despite our good intentions, these behaviors become problems because:
Disempowerment: Such actions disempower people - after all, it seems like you always know better anyway.
Centralized ownership: They signal that ownership is ultimately with you, and no one else.
Disincentivizing action: They discourage proactivity - why should I bother to do something when I already know that you’re going to show up in the end anyway?
Signals of low trust: These behaviors convey a lack of trust in others’ capabilities.
Avoidance of critical foundational work: By opting for shortcuts, the much harder and longer-term work to cultivate ownership, accountability, and other behaviors of healthy organizations are neglected. Setting clear expectations, giving feedback, having hard conversations about what happened when things went wrong: They’re not easy to do, but they’re foundational to a culture of strong momentum and ownership.
Concealing larger issues: These actions can mask larger issues and prevent the development of actual solutions. Take the example of bypassing a process: If you regularly bypass the process, it can cover up that the process is e.g. taking too long or is too complicated. But because things are still getting done, thanks to your bypassing, this will take longer to surface.
Again, even in the best teams, these can be necessary and inevitable every once in a while, but become problems once they reoccur.
Leverage insights from others
You need to examine your own point of view on the inertia to get a more comprehensive picture and choose the right actions. This could be with your direct reports, leaders of teams that you think should have taken initiative, or your peers. Select recent examples of situations where you observed inertia and speak about those situations with them. Here’s a helpful template you can use to frame this conversation:
“I’m committed to cultivate a culture of stronger ownership within the organization. As a first step, I’m trying to understand the obstacles preventing individuals from feeling empowered to take ownership. I’d like to walk through some examples of situations where my impression is that ownership wasn’t clear; my impression may be wrong! I’d like to hear your perspective on what’s going on, so we can build a better culture.”
During these discussions, refrain from using the question "why?" as it tends to trigger defensiveness. Instead, employ "what" to inquire about causation; for instance, replace "why did x happen?" with "what led to this situation?". Be genuinely curious and avoid blame. Remember, you’re just trying to understand.
Form and validate hypotheses
Armed with insights from others, you will gather more information to formulate hypotheses about the underlying dynamics. Take the next step by validating these hypotheses through discussions with the individuals you engaged with earlier.
2. Make it a shared problem
Let’s get meta: You’ve successfully transcended interia by addressing inertia within your team or organization. That's great! 🌟 But now, let’s take this a step further and involve others, so we don’t perpetuate the issue we’re trying to fix.
In my experience, the best leadership teams treat all problems as shared problems. This does *not* mean that all issues need a 20-person meeting to be resolved. 😏
Instead, it means:
Your leadership group views their role as addressing business problems - not “product problems” or “engineering problems.”
Leadership treats their peers as their “first team” (instead of their direct reports).
You are partnering closely with leaders in other functions, e.g. Product or Customer Support.
Spell it out
Tell your leadership team explicitly that noticing business challenges and addressing them together is their job. I know it sounds a bit silly, but it can be really powerful. Not everyone, especially new leaders, understands that they *need* to, and what it means to work in a much more ambiguous space than as an individual contributor. Set this expectation very clearly to give everyone a chance to step up.
Practice what you preach
Delegate what you can to your teammates; keep as few problems as you can to yourself. Ask your leadership team to work as a team on: (1) identifying the biggest challenges and opportunities they see for the business in the next time frame and (2) how they’d propose tackling those. You may also want to task them with (3) how to fix the (perceived) issue of inertia in the organization!
Share how you think
Share what rules/principles you’re applying to make those decisions (e.g.: “x is aligned with our strategy”, “y is a huge cost driver”). Help your team understand your thinking so they can emulate it.
Address specific causes of inertia
I highlighted a couple common root causes of inertia; here are specific steps you can take when you’re observing those in your organization.
Impacts of rapid change
To mitigate difficulties associated with change, it’s crucial to understand and address specific aspects that are often centered around the side effects of it, rather than the change itself. Some examples of secondary impacts include:
Shifts in social dynamics and group structures (through layoffs, re-orgs, or new initiatives).
Shifts in vision and mission, from the company, to teams, to individuals (“What even is my job now?”). A clear, shared vision is integral to well-functioning teams.
Shifts in expectations, accountability, access, and contexts - more on these below.
Social dynamics
If you’ve ever taken a first aid course, you’ve likely heard this: When you’re providing first aid to someone in an emergency situation, and other people are around, tell one person explicitly to call emergency services, e.g. “you in the blue coat, call an ambulance” - instead of just saying “someone call an ambulance!”. This approach of personalizing your request by explicitly delegating instead of making a blanketed request to a crowd is designed to avoid group inertia. In the same way, making your expectations explicit can go a long way:
Make responsibilities clear. This includes very concrete things like documenting and talking about roles and responsibilities of individuals, team missions, or service and process ownership. If the issue comes up in specific areas repeatedly, it’s also worth investing in more detailed processes, like incident management.
Give people dedicated ownership. You don’t have to create a full-blown RACI matrix for everything (even it can be helpful for some cases!), but defining who owns important bits helps! Who’s responsible for giving updates? What roles exist during an incident and how are those assigned (maybe a rotation?)? Who takes notes during meetings? - If it’s a repeated issue, make ownership clear.
Assign dedicated leadership. Similarly, it helps to know who has the lead on a specific issue, and what that leadership entails. Common examples include a project lead, incident commander and communications lead, the lead on a technical initiative.
High ambiguity and unclear expectations:
The steps above under “social dynamics” help here, too! In addition, you can:
Understand where people are coming from. Genuinely try to understand what’s motivating your teammates and what’s blocking them to behave in the way that you think they should. As outlined above (under “Leverage insights from others”), approach these conversations with a curious, open mind and try not to pigeon-hole them. I recommend speaking candidly with your teammates and educating yourself. Some resources that can be helpful here:
Getting the best out of a workforce means not pigeonholing staff
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer
Assess issues without blame. Whether it’s blameless incident reviews, retrospectives, or moving teams out of inertia: use processes that help you and your teammates have the right conversations when things aren’t going perfectly. Focus on understanding, hold the complexity that’s inherent to most things going wrong, and identify how you can make things better, together. Having simple processes defined for these conversations is just one example of →
Make it easy to do the right thing. This is one of my favorite principles for process and organizational design. If there is an area where you’re expecting specific behaviors, make those explicit. This can be as simple as setting up a bot that pings the people who own a process whenever an incident is triggered.
Too much on one plate
Do an honest review of how much work your organization has. It’s quite likely that you already have too many or too broad corporate goals, which trickle down throughout your organization. Decide what’s actually important.
Regularly align on priorities. This can take the shape of talking about their focus for the quarter/month/week in 1:1s, or asking your teammates to send you their priorities via email/Slack/Teams message every week (here’s a template that’s helped a lot of leaders with this).
Decide what’s not going to get done. Remember, strategy involves an (implicit or explicit!) decision about what you’re not going to do. You can either make this decision intentionally, or just push too much work onto everyone’s plates and just wait and see. Deciding on focus areas is really hard, but don’t leave the outcome up to chance.
Breaking free from the inertia trap requires intentional leadership, where collaboration and shared responsibility are paramount. By fostering a culture that treats challenges as shared problems, leaders empower their teams to collectively address and overcome obstacles.
