Accountability. Responsibility. Integrity. Personal Ownership.

These are qualities we’d like our colleagues, team members, employees, and classmates to embody.

At the Goff Strategic Leadership Center at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, one of the key Principles of Strategic Leadership we teach is to Deliver results with strong personal ownership. That means knowing you’ve done all you can do to push the work forward as you collaborate with others to create value.

However, while this all sounds good in theory, the actual practice of taking personal ownership over one’s work is not always as easy as it seems.

Here’s a common scenario:

In my classes, I give students the opportunity to work on real projects with real companies, which means that these projects are often quite ambiguous at the start (just as it often is in the “real world”). Part of the students’ responsibility is to get up to speed quickly as they define and scope their projects (or to put it in terms of yet another Goff SLC Principle of Strategic Leadership: Actively find and formulate the right problems).

As the students start to learn more about their industry/company/functional area, imposter syndrome starts setting in as they realize there is a lot more that they don’t (yet) know. As you can imagine, one of the first reactions of the students is to ask the “client” or project partner for help, to clarify what in the world it is that they actually want. This makes sense, because that’s what they’ve done over and over again in school. If they don’t understand the assignment, “good” students go back to the teacher to ask for clarification, right?

That’s when I often step in and say — wait. Don’t ask yet. Because this a part of the value creation agenda here and is what YOU need to uncover as a part of the work.

Needless to say, that doesn’t always go over well. And it’s understandable why that is. For most of us, our educational experience consists of someone laying a problem out in front of us that is clearly defined (and able to be graded against a rubric). So, when work comes along that is ill defined, it must be because the people giving us the problem haven’t done their jobs, right? However, in reality, organizations will pay more for folks that don’t need to have things defined for them, that can be problem finders in addition to problem solvers.

THIS is one place where Delivering results with strong personal ownership comes in.

So, how do we do it?

One way to act with strong personal ownership is to pause and check in with yourself before going to others for help. You should ask yourself:

What is the question at hand (there will likely be more than one)?
What have I done to answer it?
What have I learned?
What do I still need to answer?
How could I answer those questions myself/what resources do I have?
[Then, you should do it/utilize those resources — by the way, using Google and Wikipedia is a great way to start! Just make sure you triangulate/vet those sources…]
What questions do you still have/what help do you need?

Only after you’ve gone through this list should you reach out to others for help. And, even then, there’s likely an order of operations to whom you should ask and timeline to working through this process. For example, while the CEO might be the person who knows all the things about the company, there’s probably a great analyst or manager whose time is more readily available to you so that this CEO can spend their time on more valuable endeavors. In addition, if your project is a fast-moving one that needs to be done in one week, taking 4 days to do your own research won’t work. However, if it’s a 6-month engagement, you can take longer than 15 minutes to get up to speed.

What does this really look like?

I understand that me saying this sounds all well and good, so let’s play this out. In the scenario above, let’s assume that you are a non-business student put on a project to help a young startup with their digital marketing strategy. Well, you might be saying — digital what?

So, first things first. What questions do you have? That might look like this:

What in the world is digital marketing? And, what does a strategy around this look like?
Why does this company want to do it?
(and hopefully) SHOULD this company be doing it vs. other avenues that might achieve the same purpose?

Then, you go down the list of things above, likely Googling “digital marketing” or “digital marketing strategy” and reading voraciously until the language starts to make sense. Then you could take a look at the digital assets (a term which you have now read extensively about) of the startup, their competitors, and/or those known to be the gold standards.

To be fair, I’m not suggesting you do a dissertation on digital marketing in the process, reviewing every piece of literature that ever existed, but take a reasonable amount of time, given the overall timeframe you have for the project.

Once you get to the point where the internet can no longer help you, you might consider going to the campus library or asking that marketing major in your Greek Mythology class for some ideas. They, in turn, can lead you to other resources and experts who can get you up to speed even more quickly. And, before you know it, you’ll have some AMAZING insights and much more valuable questions you can take back to your client to thoughtfully ask with your new-found expertise on the topic.

Congratulations! You’ve moved the project farther along AND done so while creating some valuable credibility for yourself/your team. This is the power of Delivering results with strong personal ownership.