Ask any founder what they look for in their first hires, and the answer is rarely a specific degree or a particular title. They look for people who will treat the company as if it were their own. People who notice a problem and fix it without being asked. People who care about the result more than about their job description.
As companies grow, that instinct often gets lost. Hiring becomes a process of matching CVs to role descriptions. Job titles grow longer and responsibilities narrower. Before long, the organisation is full of capable people who do exactly what is asked of them, and very few who do what is needed.
At Linje we hire founders and people who think like founders, because that is what our clients need from us. But the principle applies to any business that wants to move faster.
What ownership looks like
Ownership is easy to recognise and hard to describe. A few patterns stand out.
- Owners finish things. They do not hand over a half-done task and consider their part complete. They follow through until the result is in place.
- Owners act on imperfect information. They make a reasonable decision, try it and adjust, instead of waiting for certainty that never comes.
- Owners spend money as if it were their own. They ask whether a cost is worth it, and they notice waste.
- Owners say what they see. They raise problems early, including uncomfortable ones, because they care more about the business than about being popular.
- Owners do the unglamorous work. Nobody is too senior to carry a box when it needs carrying.
None of these traits depend on age, education or experience. A graduate can have them. A senior executive can lack them.
How to find people who think like owners
Traditional interviews are poor at revealing ownership. Most candidates have learned to describe their achievements in the language of initiative and responsibility. You need to look at what people have actually done.
Ask about things they built, started or fixed outside the boundaries of their role. A side project. A student organisation. A process they changed because it annoyed them. A small business they ran. The specific project matters less than the pattern: did they take something from nothing to something, and did they stay with it when it got hard?
Give candidates a realistic problem with incomplete information and see what they do. Owners tend to ask a few sharp questions, make sensible assumptions and propose a way forward. Others tend to ask for more information, or present several options without choosing.
Finally, listen for how they talk about past failures. People who think like owners describe what went wrong, what they did about it and what they learned. People who do not tend to explain why it was someone else's fault.
Keep ownership alive as you grow
Hiring owners is the easy part. Keeping them acting like owners as the organisation grows is harder, because growth tends to bring the very things that kill ownership: layers of approval, unclear responsibilities and processes designed for the lowest common denominator.
A few principles help:
- Give real responsibility early. People take ownership of what they actually own. Make it clear who is responsible for each important result, and let them make the decisions that come with it.
- Keep decision paths short. Every extra approval tells people that their judgement is not trusted. Remove the ones that do not add information.
- Share the numbers. People cannot act like owners if they do not know how the business is doing. Be open about results, costs and priorities.
- Reward results, not activity. Notice and celebrate the people who solved a problem, not just the ones who were visibly busy.
- Tolerate sensible mistakes. If every mistake is punished, people stop taking initiative. Distinguish between a reasonable bet that did not work and carelessness.
Ownership is a choice the organisation makes
Ownership is not only a personality trait. It is also a result of how an organisation is designed and led. Hire people who have it, and then build an organisation that lets them use it. The combination is what makes a company move faster than its size would suggest.