Nobody’s Job

On the difference between ownership someone takes and ownership you hand out.

There’s an old joke about a bacon omelette. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.

Most of us have told it and been told it, sometimes several days a week. That’s the situation almost anyone senior is actually in. You want ownership from the people who report to you, and somebody above you wants it from you, and the request sounds reasonable in both directions until you have to act on it.

Notice what the joke is asking for. It’s asking people to assume ownership. To take it, unprompted, because they’ve understood what real commitment looks like. It’s a request, told downward, dressed as wisdom so it doesn’t have to be argued for.

There’s a second phrase most managers have, for the day the request didn’t work. Mine came from my boss years ago and I’ve repeated it ever since without ever asking where he got it. Things fall between the chairs. He said it whenever something had dropped, and he was almost always right about why.

Two people, adjacent roles, a piece of work sitting in the space between them. Both saw it. Neither picked it up. Not from laziness, usually. From a reasonable belief that it belonged to the other one.

Those two phrases describe opposite mechanisms, and confusing them is where most of the trouble starts. The joke is ownership assumed. The chairs are ownership that was never assigned, waiting for somebody to assume it, and nobody did.

Which sets up a question with two versions, depending on which chair you’re sitting in.

If you run the team: something is sitting in the gap. Do you wait for someone to step in, or do you give it to one of them?

If you’re next to the gap: nobody has said this is yours. Do you wait to be told, or do you take it?

Both questions have real costs on both answers, and neither is obvious.

Assign it and you get a result. You also get a team that learns to wait for assignment, because you’ve just demonstrated that unclaimed work eventually gets handed out. Do that for a year and you have people who see the gap, recognise it, and do nothing, because experience says it will arrive with a name on it soon enough. You’ll be back to telling the joke, to people you trained.

Wait for someone to step in and you get the thing you actually want, when it works. When it doesn’t, the work sits there. Deadlines pass. The gap gets expensive, and everyone involved can explain reasonably why it wasn’t theirs.

Most managers pick waiting, then get frustrated, then assign it anyway, then tell the joke. That sequence is the problem in miniature.

From the other chair, the calculation looks different and lands in the same place. Taking something nobody gave you means spending time you can’t account for, on work that isn’t in your objectives, with the possibility of being told you overstepped. Waiting is safe, defensible, and slowly corrosive. Everybody who has been in a company for more than a few years knows both of these feelings.

There’s a reason it plays out this way, and it’s in the research rather than in anyone’s character. Pierce, Kostova and Dirks set out a theory of psychological ownership in 2001, and traced it to three routes: controlling the target, coming to know it intimately, and investing yourself in it. Three, working together.

Assignment delivers two of them. The person will come to know the thing, and they’ll certainly invest effort. What assignment usually doesn’t deliver is control. And that’s why assigned ownership so often produces compliance rather than the thing you were hoping for. The work gets done. Nobody reaches beyond it.

Control is worth being precise about, because it gets misread from both chairs. Managers hear it as the final call, conclude there’s only one and it’s theirs, and decide there’s nothing to give. People being asked to own something hear it the same way and conclude there’s nothing to take.

Most real control isn’t the decision. It’s the room to move before a decision exists. Setting the terms of the discussion. Choosing who’s in the room and when. Following up so a thing doesn’t quietly die between two calendars. Drawing the perimeter of what you’ll handle and what goes up. Escalating on purpose instead of as an admission of failure. Shaping what lands on a senior desk so the call gets made on your framing rather than whoever got there first.

That kind of control is what determines whether either route works. Someone stepping into the gap voluntarily needs it, or their reaching goes nowhere and they learn not to reach. Someone handed the gap needs it too, or you’ve given them a task and called it ownership.

It also tends to be more available than people think. Waiting for a decision is easier than shaping the conditions for one, and plenty of us have reported that nothing was ours to decide when what actually happened is that we never convened anyone, never followed up, never made the trade-off visible upward while it could still be influenced. That’s a real failure and it doesn’t belong to the manager.

So the chair gap has two solutions and you want both in circulation. Clarity closes it from above. Someone stepping in closes it from below. The second is better, and the first is what you use when the second isn’t happening.

If you run the team, that gives you a rule for when to assign. Assign when the cost of the gap is higher than the cost of the lesson, and be honest with yourself that you’re paying the lesson. Assign when the two people genuinely can’t see it, because a gap nobody perceives isn’t a test of ownership, it’s a failure of information. And when you do assign, hand over the room with it, or you’ve just moved a task.

The rest of the time, make the reaching cheap. Say plainly what someone can do without coming back to you, including calling the meeting, chasing the peer and going up a level. Open the information they’ve been kept out of, because nobody owns what they can’t see. Find the approval step that exists only because it always has, and remove it. Say out loud what a first failure will cost, because everyone is quietly calculating that anyway and your silence isn’t reassuring.

Then watch what happens the first time someone steps in and gets it wrong. That’s the moment the whole thing is decided. Take it back and everyone learns what ownership meant here. It meant you could decide as long as you decided correctly. Nobody on that team will reach again, and you’ll be assigning gaps for the rest of your tenure.

If you’re the one next to the gap, the case for stepping in is stronger than it looks from inside the hesitation.

Assigned work proves you can execute, which is worth something and is also true of everyone else at your level. The gap is where judgment gets built, because nobody told you it was yours and you had to work out what mattered on your own. That’s the part you can’t learn from a task with instructions attached, and it’s the part that stays with you when the role, the company and the org chart have all changed.

The reverse takes longer to show up and it’s harder to recover from. People who consistently let things drop get a reputation before they get a conversation about it. Not as difficult, which would at least be interesting. As someone you have to work around. The gaps get routed elsewhere, the interesting work follows the gaps, and eventually the person is technically fine at their job and quietly outside anything that matters. Nobody ever tells them. They just stop being asked.

The joke asks people to be the pig. Nobody can volunteer for that, and nobody should.

If the chairs are yours to arrange, the job is to make reaching cheap, and to close with clarity the gaps that nobody can see.

And if you’re the one sitting next to a gap, reach into it. Waiting to be told keeps you exactly the size of your job description. Everything you learned that made you worth listening to came from work nobody assigned you.

Further Reading:

Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 298–310.