A lot of business owners say that they want more ownership from their team. I hear that all of the time, but when I dig in, I realize that they've never actually defined exactly what that means. When I ask, ownership of what, at what level, they don't know the answer. And without those answers, frustration is absolutely going to be inevitable.

So today I want to break down for you the 4 ownership levels, why you're getting stuck in the work even when you have a team, and how to define your team's ownership.

So first, what are the 4 ownership levels? There are 4 levels, and let's start from the lowest level: implementation. This is all about the tasks that are the direct hands-on work, the building, the doing, the delivering, the fulfilling. It's following systems, executing the plan, completing the work.

Then there's management. Management is all about managing the resources to deliver the results. The resources being people, capacity, budget, timelines, and then providing accountability to ensure that those are met.

The next level is strategy, and this is all about creating a plan to get results. It's about analyzing where you are now, setting goals as milestones to accomplish a bigger vision, determining the how, how you're going to get from where you are now to where you want to be in the simplest and most efficient way, setting out the priorities to focus on, and communicating that how to the team.

Then the highest level is all about vision. Vision is about defining where we're headed. It's future-focused. It's staying ahead of the team, staying ahead of what the focus is in the business right now, imagining what's possible, generating ideas for improvements or new directions, and then casting that vision to the team, casting where the business is going, why it matters, and defining that direction for the future.

So those are the 4 ownership levels. Let's look at a quick example. Let's talk about marketing. Back in my marketing agency days, when I started, I was fresh out of college and I started in an assistant-level role, and that was an implementation role. I was doing exactly what I was told. I had tasks that I needed to get done, and that's what my day was spent doing every day, just checking the box and getting tasks done. I was doing the work.

As I leveled up, I became a marketing coordinator. At that time, I was beginning to touch on some project management, but I was still heavily involved in implementation as well.

For a specific team member or any specific role, it is possible to spend your time in more than one ownership level, but it's never going to be focused on more than two ownership levels that are adjacent to one another. So in my marketing coordinator role, I was splitting implementation and beginning to take on some management responsibility, but really not management of the people, more so management of the projects. I began putting in project plans and following up on deadlines, checking in on where things were, that kind of thing.

Then I continued to level up and became a marketing account exec. As an account executive, I was beginning to manage entire accounts, entire client accounts. At that point, I was actually stepping out of a lot of the implementation and more so focused on just managing those projects and those relationships. I began to dabble in that role more into strategy. As I sat in and learned from those that I worked for, I was given more and more responsibility and began to really advise the clients that I was serving on their strategy and began to learn how to develop strategic marketing plans.

From there, I actually went on to become a marketing strategist. That was the role that I had, the title that I had, just marketing strategist. A big part of that role that I spent most of my time on was strategy. I developed strategic marketing plans for how to get my clients from where they were to where they wanted to be.

Fast forward and I became a marketing team lead. At that point, I was actually still involved in management, still involved in strategy, but now the management actually involved more of the management of people. I was now managing the marketing team.

Then at the highest level, I began to cast vision for what our department would actually look like. I didn't own the vision for the entire marketing agency because I wasn't the owner of the agency, but I held and cast vision for what our marketing department could look like, how we would serve clients, how we would coordinate our work and manage things day to day, how we would improve things. So I had more of a mix of strategy and vision at that level.

I hope that helps you see how, within the same function, marketing, I actually grew my role over time and evolved from implementation to management to strategy to vision.

Now, that's not possible for everyone. Some people are great at one piece. They are great implementers, but they are not great strategic thinkers. Or they're really great at strategy and they're not great at follow-through or the details, and they don't want to be involved in the implementation at all. That's just a couple of quick examples. So you have to be careful and not assume that everyone can evolve and take on each of those ownership levels.

Also within marketing, I worked with and managed a team that involved a lot of different implementation roles than the ones that I was in. Team members like copywriters, designers, and that's just to name a couple of quick roles. I could go further and look at different digital marketing specialist roles because we had SEO specialists, we had social media managers, and I could name so many roles that were people who were doing the hands-on implementation of the work. They were doing the writing, they were doing the designing. There were even different creative directors who were involved in management and strategy of the creative side.

Within marketing, I could talk about those different tiers from a lot of different angles, and that's really true within any function. I used marketing as an example. I just showed you how it was more expansive than even just the lane that I was in. But even beyond marketing, the ownership levels apply to other functions in a business.

What I mean by a function is if you think about different departments or different responsibilities, whether that's operations, and that includes things like finance and HR, whether you think about client success and meeting delivery and fulfillment, there are roles within that piece. In a marketing agency, my role actually split both client success and marketing because we were delivering marketing for our clients on the agency side.

With all of that said, no matter what the function, the department, the role is, there are these four ownership levels present. You really have to understand that in order to get the best from your team and make sure that expectations align.

Now, the second thing I want to dive into is why you're getting stuck in the work when you have a team, when you've started delegating. This is a big one because hiring a team does not automatically give you back time. A lot of people try to hire, they try to delegate, thinking they're going to get all of this time back, and then they're absolutely exhausted. That's because they are delegating some responsibility, but they're not clearly defining ownership, or they're not handing off ownership at every level.

Until you actually hand off ownership of all four of those levels within a specific role, then you are still going to be involved. If you are delegating implementation, you're not out of the work because someone still has to be responsible for vision, for strategy, and for management. I really want that part to sink in.

You have to transition or transfer ownership across all 4 levels within a function before that role, that function, is completely off of your plate as the business owner. That might require multiple people, but it doesn't mean that you have to have a large team. You just have to understand who owns what and clearly define that.

So let's talk a little bit more about why you get stuck, what actually happens. You hire that team, you begin to delegate, but you're still exhausted and you're telling yourself, okay, this isn't working. Maybe no one can do it like I can. No one cares like I do. But that's not the problem, and your team isn't the problem. It's that you're delegating tasks, you're delegating implementation and not true ownership.

Right now, if that's you, then you're probably managing a team by telling them exactly what to do and then reminding them to do it, reviewing it when the work is done and fixing it when it's wrong. When there's a problem, you are the one solving it. In other words, you've hired people and you're only delegating implementation, or you've hired someone for a role that you expected more out of, but they're only capable of implementation.

Like I said, that means you still own the management, the strategy, and the vision. You probably keep jumping back into implementation too, if we're being really honest. So of course, if that's the case, you're exhausted. You're still operating at every level. You haven't actually moved yourself out of that role.

Business owners who have both a team and free time aren't just delegating implementation. They're delegating at a higher level of ownership. That means their team is able to spot problems before they escalate. Their team is bringing solutions instead of questions. Their team is making decisions without just escalating them up to you for constant approval. Your team is delivering work that actually moves the needle. That's the kind of delegation that actually gives your time back instead of costing you more of it.

When this happens, when you delegate more ownership, your team knows what they own. Decision authority is more clear. Roles are aligned with their capabilities. Work stops bouncing back to you because your team is now thinking. They're not just doing what they're told. They're thinking proactively, they're leading, they're owning the outcomes. That's when you feel more supported, when decisions are able to move without you, when work is progressing without you, and when scaling is not going to cost you your time or your life.

Making that shift is really an important shift in your business, and it's one that so many of my clients have this aha moment about and realize what a game changer it is. It's when they finally start to feel free.

So how does that happen? How do we make this shift? Making it happen has to start with defining ownership for each team member.

For each person on your team, you need to define a few different things. First, their role. What is their actual job title? Then what ownership level is that correlated to? What ownership level are they expected to operate at?

Next, what are their responsibilities? What are the recurring activities or decisions that sit with them, that they are responsible for, that if they do nothing else, they know that they have to do those things or make those decisions? That's something that they own.

Third, what are the results? What measurable outcomes are they fully accountable for? They need to know the role, the responsibilities, and the results that they own.

Once you define what those should be, you have to check for alignment with the team member to see if they're capable and if they're motivated to operate at that level. Someone can be capable of doing something and not interested in it at all, or they could be really interested in it and not capable. You need them to be both.

Like I said earlier, one person really can't sustainably operate across more than two adjacent ownership levels long-term. They might know how to do something, but one of two things is going to happen if you give them too much responsibility across all of these ownership levels.

First, they're going to be really unhappy with their role and disengaged because they really want to operate at a higher level, but you're assigning them lower-level work, or the opposite. Either way, they're unhappy. Maybe they prefer implementation work and you keep asking them to do strategic-level thinking, but they really just enjoy doing the work and that's their wheelhouse.

So they become unhappy and disengaged. They're not happy in their role. Maybe they're overwhelmed, they're feeling burnt out, and they're just not satisfied. They become frustrated, or you become frustrated with their results because you're expecting something of them that isn't aligned with what they're capable of.

Either they're not motivated to do it and they become frustrated, or they're not capable of it, they don't meet your expectations or deliver the results that are expected, and you become frustrated. So we need to align their role, their responsibilities, and their results. Then you have to check for alignment and make sure you have the right person in the right seat.

With all of that said, I want you to understand that ownership is not something that you demand. It's something that you define. You can't just show up and say, hey team, I want you to take more ownership. You need to clearly articulate what that means for each of their roles. You need to let them know what their role is, at what level of ownership, what responsibilities, and what results they're accountable for.

You need to understand that one person isn't going to be great at all 4 ownership levels. It'll either be too much to manage or they just won't be capable of it.

If you're feeling like the bottleneck, it's likely because you are holding onto too many ownership levels all at one time, or maybe you're expecting someone else to operate at a level that was never clearly assigned, so they aren't taking the initiative and meeting your expectations, and it comes back to you.

I want you to think about each function of your business. Let's say we talk about 3 core departments and we look at growth encompassing marketing and sales. Let's start there. What level are you operating at? Which ownership level are you operating at within marketing and sales? Are you still implementing? If you're doing any implementation work, then you're still an implementer. Or are you out of implementation and you've moved up to management, strategy, or vision? Define which level you're operating at within the growth department, within your marketing and sales.

Now look at operations. When you think about systems and tech and HR and finance and some of those types of responsibilities, project management as an example, where are you operating? Have you delegated that work or are you still in the midst of it? If you're in the midst of it, at what level? Are you still an implementer or are you higher up?

Then look at delivery, client work. What level are you operating at within that department? That's going to give you a really solid understanding of why you're still stuck in the weeds, why you're still involved across the board in every department.

When you see that you thought you delegated some things, but you didn't delegate it all, you didn't delegate all of the ownership, you'll see very clearly what the gap is to get you out of that department fully.

So where are you operating at today within each of those departments? The last thing I want to leave you with is to think about where are you unclear with your team, or where are they unclear about what they own? I want you to be crystal clear about what each person on your team is responsible for, and I want you to communicate that to them clearly so that you're not expecting something that they aren't aligned with.

You can't hold someone accountable for something that they aren't aware of, that they aren't aligned with. Again, ownership is not something that you demand. It's something that you define. You need to define that for yourself and for your team in order to get yourself out of the weeds and ensure that your team is actually owning work at a higher level.