Understanding the Inertia Trap: Why Your Team Members Don’t Take Ownership
“I want people to take more ownership.”
“I want the managers reporting to me to work as a team.”
“I have too much on my plate and no help!”
These are the themes I’m hearing in many of my coaching sessions lately. Is it the weather? School breaks? I wish I knew! But one thing I can say for certain, these pleas often revolve around superficial symptoms (“too much to do!”) or perceived root causes (“low ownership!”).
You’ve also likely experienced that just telling people to “own more” or “take more ownership” doesn’t solve these issues longer-term. That’s because these remarks and feelings are symptoms of a larger problem: an inertia trap.
Understanding inertia traps and how they occur will help you take targeted steps to tackle the one your team is in. If you’re looking for just action items to break free, I’ve got you: Read on in “Understanding the Inertia Trap: Why Your Team Members Don’t Take Ownership”.
An inertia trap is what I use to describe a common team dynamic: Many individuals are present (either remotely or in-person), yet no one steps up to lead, address a problem, or voice concerns about ongoing issues.
What is an Inertia Trap?
An Inertia Trap is teams/organizations that are stuck, often without knowing it. I call it the “inertia” trap because it captures a spectrum of organizational and team dynamics that typically show up as:
Someone (e.g. a leader, manager)
recognizes a need for action (e.g. a technical problem needs to be fixed), and
believes someone exists (e.g. a team, an engineer) who should take this action,
but is not actually taking it.
I find the inertia trap highly valuable in describing symptoms and dynamics. I intentionally use this concept to focus first on observing what’s going on. Symptoms like “low ownership” or “low accountability” are just a few common root causes of inertia, and honing in on inertia helps to understand the situation first before ascribing diagnoses. In addition, diagnoses like “no ownership” or “low accountability” are often associated with value judgment or blame, which a more neutral framing like “inertia” avoids.
Here’s the good news: In my experience, inertia seldom arises out of malice. Instead, it typically results from blindspots baked into systems and processes. Understanding those will help you fix the inertia issue in your organization, so let’s take a closer look at how it shows up:
Signs that Your Teams Have Fallen into an Inertia Trap
Here’s how to tell there’s an inertia issue on your teams (e.g. your technical and people leads, or the product and engineering managers in your org):
Lack of initiative when things go wrong: No one seems to step up to figure out how to fix it when things go wrong (e.g. an incident affecting unowned legacy systems). While leaders or individual engineers seem aware, no one is taking the initiative to take the lead on finding a solution. A common example is that engineers chat in an incident response channel, but seem to run around directionless and without coordination in “headless chicken” mode.
Unclear expectations: You frequently hear people say, “I don’t know what’s expected of me.” This can also show up more implicitly, e.g. with a pattern of people underperforming, often people who are all at the same level, like technical leads, staff engineers, or engineering managers.
Divisive mentality: There’s an “us vs them” mentality among leaders in your organization, or frequent finger-pointing e.g. Engineering Managers blaming Product Managers for slowness in delivery, or vice versa.
Frustrated leadership: You find yourself or your fellow leaders saying things like, “I wish people would step up more,” “Why is no one doing x?!,” or “Someone should be fixing this.”
Low or no feedback: There’s gossiping among employees, while managers or team members don’t get feedback directly. This indirect communication can contribute to a breakdown in open and constructive dialogue within your organization.
Feedback triangulation, when individuals give feedback about someone (e.g. their teammate) to a third person (e.g. another teammate), instead of directly. This can also hinder transparent communication and resolution.
Superficial, overtly positive and even enthusiastic feedback between team members and managers, especially with no or almost no constructive feedback and ideas for improvement. What may look like a state where everything is wonderful, often masks deeper issues and inhibits honest dialogue that could drive meaningful change.
Low accountability: There is an absence of proactive responsibility, which perpetuates a cycle of inaction. This fosters an environment where individuals refrain from leading, which hinders progress and perpetuates a pattern of stagnation (you can read more about accountability here).
All of these can show up even in healthy organizations with strong momentum, but will usually be isolated issues that are addressed quickly. They become symptoms of an inertia trap when they become patterns across various contexts and involve different individuals or groups.
Common Causes of an Inertia Trap
Here are the five most common factors that can lead to teams and organizations falling into an inertia trap. They’re usually connected and tend to show up together.
I want to invite you to think about which of these you’ve seen in your organization - this will help you pick the most impactful steps you can take to fix the issues! I’m sharing concrete steps to address these specific causes below.
Cause 1: Rapid or drastic organizational change and growth - “I have no idea what’s going on”
Change is vital for businesses, but humans often require time to grasp it, leading to tension and pressure that can slow down an organization. Some of these challenges include:
Change fatigue. Individuals and teams are just tired of change, demotivated, resistant to new change, or even burnt out.
Individuals stuck in reactive mode. This often happens after changes that people didn’t have a say in or disagree with (layoffs are a typical example, but often it can even include process changes), but that they have to deal with anyway. Feeling a lack of agency can lead to demotivation and even shutting down.
Cause 2: Social dynamics - “I’m sure someone else is on it”
Any group develops some typical dynamics just because of their collective presence. Understanding these will help you understand inertia and designing effective solutions:
The bystander effect, the theory that people are less likely to take initiative in group settings. Recent research found that individuals tend to assist strangers in emergencies. At the same time, studies show this effect playing out in the workplace: The more employees share information among themselves, the less likely anyone is to bring it up with managers.
Diffusion of responsibility. In large groups, individuals assume that others are better suited to help, leading to a shared belief that responsibility is distributed among everyone. Consequently, no one makes the effort to step up.
Group cohesion. The desire to conform to “correct” or socially acceptable behavior plays a significant role. We want to socially conform by fitting into a crowd. Rooted in our evolution as humans, this used to be an important survival mechanism: Standing out and being different isn’t welcomed. When no one else acts, we take it as a signal that a response is unnecessary or inappropriate.
Cause 3: High ambiguity, and unclear expectations: “I don’t know what to do, and I don’t think it’s my job to find out”
In settings marked by high ambiguity, individuals struggle with unclear expectations:
Ambiguity of the situation. In situations that aren’t well-defined or understood, or where it’s not clear what needs to be done, people struggle more with taking action.
Access to knowledge and understanding. The absence or limited access to essential knowledge and understanding compounds the challenge, leaving individuals ill-equipped to navigate complex situations:
In smaller companies: Knowledge is concentrated within a small group, creating a disparity in information distribution.
In larger companies: Poor or nonexistent documentation and a lack of established practices for knowledge sharing like onboarding processes or central information hubs like wikis.
Low accountability and high blame further complicate matters: A culture of blame permeates, hindering individual and collective accountability. This stunts the organization's ability to address challenges collaboratively.
Cause 4: Differences in context and point of view
Context differences lead to gaps in perspective and interpretation. This may feel basic, but is easy to forget: Your perspective on and interpretation of a situation is different from everyone else’s.
Especially as a leader, you likely have more context than others, which also means that your assessment and interpretation of a situation will differ. A typical symptom is when you find yourself asking, “Why did we not prioritize fixing this issue? [Important customer] has been asking about this, and their renewal depends on it!” There are a few causes for these different contexts and purviews:
Visibility of the issue and context: In the example of a critical customer issue, the answer to no one stepping up can be as simple as no one being aware that the issue is so critical.
Cultural differences: Not everyone was socialized to speak up, give critical feedback (even more so: criticism towards management and the company!), or step outside of a defined role to take on bigger issues or assume responsibility.
Gendered differences: Similarly, a lot of expectations around behaviors like “taking ownership” can have gendered connotations. It’s important not to generalize as socializations can differ quite drastically. Historically, “just doing things” or even “taking the lead” used to be more associated with more masculine traits, whereas more careful and thoughtful planning used to be instilled more in women and femme-presenting people.
Cause 5: Too busy, tired, and overwhelmed: “I can’t pay attention to this because there’s so much going on and I have so much to do!”
In my experience, this is one of the most common root causes when leaders lament “low ownership.” Individuals just have too much on their plate already.
Between busyness, unclear expectations, or simple yet complicated social dynamics, there are a lot of reasons why teams are not taking the ownership you’d expect—and (usually) none of them are bad intentions.
So how do you get your teams and organization out of an inertia trap? Read about it in part two: Breaking Free from the Inertia Trap: How to Get Your Team Members to Take Ownership.
