By Great Ukazim, Founder, Beingsphere International
A few years ago, while moving offices, a colleague pointed to a sturdy table and suggested that it be left behind. Buying a new one, he argued, would be cheaper than transporting the existing table to the new office.
Then came a simple question: If that table were yours, sitting in your own house, would you leave it behind?
His answer was immediate: “No. But it isn’t mine.”
The table had not changed. Its quality had not changed. Its usefulness had not changed. The only thing that changed was the person’s relationship with it.
That answer has stayed with me for years because I continue to encounter the same mindset in African organisations.
For years, the standard diagnosis of Africa’s business challenge has been a shortage of skilled talent. I have never been entirely convinced.
I grew up inside my father’s business in Eastern Nigeria, where ownership was not a concept anyone had to teach. It was simply a way of life. The pattern became clearer much later, while working at FATE Foundation and engaging closely with entrepreneurs across Nigeria.
I observed that the companies that grew and endured were rarely those with the best résumés. Their products were often not necessarily the most sophisticated either. What set them apart was something deeper: people at every level behaved as though the outcome belonged to them personally, not merely to the founder or the organisation.
That, I believe, is Africa’s real talent challenge.
The Missing Ingredient Is Ownership
Organisational
psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: psychological ownership.
It is the feeling that a job, business, institution or outcome is “mine”, whether or not the individual owns a single share.
Research over the past two decades, involving hundreds of thousands of people, has repeatedly pointed to the power of this feeling. People who develop a sense of ownership tend to do the work that cannot be forced out of them.
They fix what is broken. They protect what matters. They improve what others have already accepted as normal.
There is a difference between a committed employee and a satisfied employee.
A satisfied employee may rate the organisation highly. A committed employee may choose to stay. But an owner treats the organisation’s problems as personal problems.
That is a completely different ball game.
The challenge is particularly urgent in Africa, where organisations are losing people at a rate that should concern every serious business leader.
Gallup reports that roughly 72 per cent of employees in Sub-Saharan Africa are actively seeking their next job—the highest rate globally. At the same time, global employee engagement remains low, at about 20 per cent, with disengagement estimated to cost the global economy trillions of dollars annually.
For Nigerian employers, the competition is no longer limited to other companies within the same city or sector.
The competition now includes London, Canada, remote-first companies in the United States and employers anywhere in the world that can access African talent digitally.
And there is another challenge. According to Afrobarometer, more than half of young Africans would rather build their own businesses than work for someone else’s.
That should force us to ask a difficult question: Are young Africans rejecting work—or are they rejecting workplaces where they see no path to ownership?
Ambition Is Not the Problem
Many leaders respond to the changing workforce by describing the younger generation as entitled.
I understand the frustration. I have felt it myself.
But the evidence suggests that the problem is not a lack of ambition.
Deloitte has found that 76 per cent of Gen Z professionals still aspire to reach senior leadership positions. The ambition is clearly there.
What many young professionals increasingly demand is honesty about the organisation, recognition for what they build and a clear path forward.
These are not unreasonable demands.
In fact, research suggests that they are precisely the conditions that help create psychological ownership.
The new generation is not necessarily rejecting ownership. In many cases, it is demanding the conditions that make ownership possible—and leaving when those conditions are absent.
Ownership Has a Cost
So, what does it take to build ownership in an organisation?
The honest answer is that it is not free.
It costs managers time. It requires leaders to share information they may previously have kept close to themselves.
It demands uncomfortable conversations about the organisation’s finances, challenges and future.
It requires recognising people by name for what they have built, rather than hiding behind vague praise for “the team”.
But ownership does not necessarily require giving away equity.
Studies of employee share schemes have shown that shares alone have limited impact on performance.
What transforms organisations is the combination of ownership with genuine participation, access to information and meaningful decision-making rights.
The most effective organisations push decision-making closer to the people doing the work.
That process must begin with managers.
Gallup research shows that managers have an enormous influence on their teams, while also representing one of the most disengaging groups in the workforce.
This is not surprising. People rarely give what they do not feel they possess themselves.
A manager who has no voice, no authority and no sense of ownership will struggle to create ownership among others.
The Danger of Taking Ownership Too Far
Ownership, however, must be properly understood.
Taken too far, it can become territorialism. Departments begin to build silos. Individuals protect their own areas instead of serving the wider organisation.
Ownership must also never become an excuse for burnout.
People who care about outcomes should not be expected to sacrifice their evenings, weekends and personal lives indefinitely. A healthy culture of ownership means caring deeply about results while also creating sustainable systems for achieving them.
Ownership is not martyrdom.
From a Table to a Methodology
At Beingsphere, the table question eventually became the foundation for the OWN IT methodology.
I became tired of admiring research without translating it into action. The central question became simple: How do we help organisations deliberately build cultures in which people behave as though the outcomes belong to them?
Before any organisation considers enrolling its team in a six-week OWN IT behavioural transformation programme, I encourage leaders to begin with a simple exercise.
Walk through your organisation this week.
Ask your people:
What would you never leave behind?
And then ask:
What would you abandon without a second thought?
The answers may reveal more about the organisation’s culture than any employee engagement survey.
Africa’s real constraint is not a shortage of ideas.
It is not necessarily a shortage of capital. It is the shortage of people equipped and empowered to build institutions that can endure.
Those people are made, not merely found.And ownership is one of the ways they are made.
The most dangerous words in any organisation remain: “That is not my job.”
The most valuable words remain:
“I will own it.”
About the Author
Great Ukazim is the Founder of Beingsphere International, an African innovation infrastructure and human development company, and the creator of the OWN IT methodology for building cultures of ownership.
His work has taken him deep into entrepreneurship ecosystems across 28 states in Nigeria, where he has trained and mentored founders, professionals and emerging leaders from Senegal, Egypt, Mali, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and other parts of Africa.
Today, he helps organisations and entrepreneurs build people, cultures and institutions that endure.
