When "Everyone Owns It" Backfires

TRANSILIENCE PARTNERS · PERSPECTIVE

When "Everyone Owns It" Backfires

by Doug Girvin, Transilience Partners

Why "business development is everyone's job" often makes your team more anxious — not more productive.

A leader I worked with recently did something that looked, on paper, exactly right. Facing ambitious growth targets, he gathered his team — project managers, project officers, technical directors — and told them that business development was now everyone's responsibility. Growth couldn't sit with one person anymore. Everybody owned it.

The intent was right. The result was not. Within weeks the team wasn't more entrepreneurial — it was more anxious. People who were excellent at their jobs suddenly felt they were failing at a new one nobody had defined. And quietly, something more dangerous was forming: the trusted experts who delivered the work were now being asked to sell it.

I've seen this pattern often enough to treat it as close to a law. "Everyone owns it" is one of the most well-intentioned, most reliably counterproductive things a leader can say. Here's why — and what works instead.

Ambiguity is not a soft problem

We tend to treat role ambiguity as a minor inconvenience — something people should just figure out. The research says otherwise. Organizational psychologists have studied role ambiguity — not knowing what's expected of you — since the 1960s, and the findings are remarkably consistent: it's tied to lower satisfaction, lower commitment, weaker performance and higher burnout.

What's striking is how it compares to the stressor everyone actually worries about: workload. In the "challenge–hindrance" research, demanding-but-meaningful pressures like a heavy workload can actually raise engagement — they're hard, but they mean something. Role ambiguity does the opposite. It's a pure hindrance: all cost, no upside. Put plainly, being unclear about what's expected of you can be more corrosive than being busy.

And it's everywhere. In Gallup's most recent U.S. data, only 46% of employees clearly know what's expected of them at work, down from 56% in 2020 — a number that's been falling, not rising. So when you announce that "everyone owns" something without defining it, you're not filling a gap. You're pouring more of the single most under-appreciated stressor in the workplace onto people who are already carrying it.

The trap nobody names: trust

There's a second, subtler problem — and it's the one that does the lasting damage.

Your delivery people — the engineers, the project leads, the specialists — hold a specific kind of power with your clients: they're trusted. The client believes them precisely because they're not selling anything. The moment you push a trusted advisor into a sales posture, you put that trust at risk. You're asking one person to hold two incompatible identities at once: the expert the client leans on, and the vendor trying to grow the account.

Psychologists have a name for this collision — role conflict — and it's the twin of role ambiguity in the same body of research. But you don't need the literature to recognize it. We've all watched a technical expert get pushed toward a quota and slowly lose the very credibility that made them valuable. The relationship cools. The advice starts to sound like a pitch. Everyone can feel it, even if no one says it.

So the well-meaning "everyone sells" mandate manages to trigger both classic role stressors at once — ambiguity and conflict — and usually adds overload as a third. Three stressors, one sentence.

Don't abandon the idea. Do it properly.

Here's the part that matters: the instinct to share ownership of growth is right. Growth genuinely is too important to leave to a single hire you may not be able to make. The fix isn't to retreat to "BD is the BD person's job." The fix is to stop treating a complex process as a slogan and start treating it as a design problem.

It comes down to two moves.

Define and decompose. Take the process — business development, or quality, or client experience, whatever you've been hand-waving as "everyone's job" — and break it into its real, discrete activities. Market intelligence. Spotting an opportunity. Nurturing a relationship. Contributing technical substance to a proposal. Surfacing follow-on work from great delivery. Keeping the data clean. Suddenly "BD" isn't a vague burden; it's a set of concrete slices, each of which someone can actually own.

Match by talent, trust and capacity. Then assign each slice deliberately, against three filters. Talent — who's genuinely good at this? Trust — does owning this slice strengthen the person's role, or compromise the trust it depends on? Capacity — do they have room, and will their manager protect it? That middle filter is the one almost everyone skips, and it's the most important. Some slices — sharing insight, spotting opportunities, growing accounts through great work — reinforce a trusted expert's standing. Others — active pursuit, pricing, closing — corrode it, and belong with someone whose role is openly commercial.

Do that, and the ambiguity disappears (the work is defined), the conflict disappears (no one's asked to betray their role), and contribution becomes something you can recognize rather than just demand. We make it real by writing those slices into how performance is set and measured — so the expectation is explicit, and the contribution is rewarded.

What actually happens

When that leader and I went back and did this properly, the change was fast and visible. The stress came down — not because we asked less of people, but because we finally told them clearly what we were asking, and matched it to what they were already good at. The process got better, because the right talent was on each piece.

And something we hadn't planned for happened: a couple of delivery people, now that they finally understood what business development actually was, started to see themselves growing into it. The specialist role that had been so hard to fill suddenly had internal candidates — grown by the very act of defining the work.

That's the quiet power of clarity. Most organizations run on two maps: the org chart, which says where people sit, and the real map of the work, which never respects those boxes. The space between them — the cross-cutting processes nobody clearly owns — is where both the anxiety and the opportunity live. Name the work, match it to the right people in a way that protects their relationships, and recognize it. You'll lower the stress and raise the performance at the same time.

How clear — and how trust-safe — are your own cross-cutting processes? Read Adjacent Accountabilities for the full idea, or take the five-minute Optimized, or Effective? diagnostic to see where your organization stands.

Notes & sources

• Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., Snoek, J. D. & Rosenthal, R. A. — Organizational Stress: Studies in Role Conflict and Ambiguity (1964): the origin of the role ambiguity and role conflict research.
• Rizzo, J. R., House, R. J. & Lirtzman, S. I. — "Role Conflict and Ambiguity in Complex Organizations," Administrative Science Quarterly (1970).
• Cavanaugh, M. A., Boswell, W. R., Roehling, M. V. & Boudreau, J. W. — "An Empirical Examination of Self-Reported Work Stress Among U.S. Managers," Journal of Applied Psychology (2000): the challenge–hindrance distinction.
• LePine, J. A., Podsakoff, N. P. & LePine, M. A. — meta-analysis of challenge and hindrance stressors, Academy of Management Journal (2005); Crawford, E. R., LePine, J. A. & Rich, B. L. — challenge and hindrance demands and engagement, Journal of Applied Psychology (2010).
• Gallup — "U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low" (January 2025): 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% in March 2020. (gallup.com.)