My last quest at GOG was to sell it.

Strictly speaking, the job was simple: keep the business stable, clean up the numbers, get the deal done. Instead I found myself working on a new strategy, new products, and a reorganization into cross-functional pillars, for a company I was about to hand over. To some extent it cut against short-term interests. I couldn’t help it. I felt responsible for the people who worked there, and I wanted the company to do well after I was gone.

I didn’t found GOG. I joined as an intern and spent ten years there, the last three as Managing Director. Somewhere along the way, a company someone else had built became mine to worry about. How does that happen? And can a leader make it happen for others?

Building is the easy way in

When you build something, ownership comes for free. Researchers call one version of this the IKEA effect: people value things they assembled themselves more than identical ones they didn’t. Founders rarely need to be taught to care.

Most of us never get that shortcut. We inherit companies, teams, products, processes, and goals someone else set. The real question is how anyone comes to own what they didn’t create.

Ownership comes in degrees

Most organizations hold one of two beliefs about ownership. Either it’s a talent: some people have it, so you hire for it and give up on the rest. Or it’s a skill: anyone can learn it, and learning it is the employee’s job. Both end badly. The first writes off most of the team. The second sends people to a workshop and blames them when nothing changes.

Self-determination theory offers a third view. It describes ownership as a path that comes in degrees, and calls the journey internalization. A goal handed to you from outside can travel a long way: from “I’m told to,” through “I see why it matters,” to “this is part of who I am.” Same goal, a completely different relationship to it. I’d add one condition: the role is part of who I am for as long as I’m in it. Forget that, and the role starts eating the person.

The talent view has a point. Some people travel that path faster. Psychologists call it a proactive personality: a stable tendency to take initiative and change your surroundings. Some people get it as a talent, and the rest have to learn it. Life’s not fair. There’s no fair.

The good news is in how the talent works. Sharon Parker and her colleagues found that proactive personality acts through two states that can be developed: confidence to act beyond your role, and a flexible sense of where your role ends, so that problems outside your job description still feel like yours. Job autonomy builds the same states. The talent gives some people a head start. Everyone else can catch up.

The leader holds most of the inputs

Nobody walks that path alone. It’s walked hand in hand, and most of the work sits with whoever hands the goal over. Edward Deci and his colleagues tested what helps people internalize a task they find dull but important. Three things did: a meaningful rationale, acknowledgment of how people feel about the task, and a sense of choice.

Those three map almost exactly onto management by mission, the military practice of telling people what to achieve and why, and leaving the how to them.

  • The rationale is the intent. A mission states the purpose, the desired end state, and why it matters. People can obey a goal without a why. Owning one takes the why.
  • Acknowledgment happens in the backbrief. Right after you hand over a goal, ask people to brief you back: what they understood, what they plan to do, what worries them. Listening to that last part is the acknowledgment.
  • Choice lives inside the boundaries. The leader sets what can’t be done, which resources are available, and which decisions stay at the top. Everything inside those lines belongs to the team. That space is the thing people come to own.

The best example I had was bosses who didn’t have all the answers. When your boss admits they don’t know, the relationship turns into camaraderie: two people facing the same problem. Taking on their problem feels natural, because it’s already shared. A boss who has every answer leaves you one job: carrying them out.

What it costs, and who should notice

Ownership has a price. Research on people who take initiative beyond their roles links it to more role overload, more job stress, and more conflict between work and family. And initiative only earns credit when it reads right: supervisors reward proactive behavior when they see good intentions behind it.

My own bill came in health and relationships. Over those years I gained 40 kilos. I’m 20 down from the peak now, and I’m better.

For a leader, this is a warning. The people who take the most ownership are the ones most likely to pay for it, and organizations rarely notice until the bill arrives. Ownership also makes letting go hard: people who own everything become bottlenecks, and every change lands on them as a personal loss. Protecting your highest-ownership people from their own strength is part of the job.

So expect ownership from your team, including ownership of things they didn’t build. Expect it in degrees, as something people grow into over time. And expect the matching skill from whoever leads them: giving the real reason, hearing what the change costs, leaving room to choose the how. Those are learnable, and they’re what makes ownership possible.

If you lead people, the conditions for ownership are yours to own.