OWNERSHIP AND RISK TAKING

I believe that if the right talent is attracted and selected then the responsibility to build ownership and risk taking attitude is of the SME owner/founder. It is a slow process and the time taken will depend on both the owner/founder and senior leader in question, however, at the heart of this process is, for the SME owner to develop the mentality of accepting failure.

- Rajiv Misra

One of the common things I hear from a number of textile SME owners, is how they end up doing most of the heavy lifting. Even the senior members of their team are unable or unwilling to take ownership of getting things done or not wanting to take the risk of taking wrong decisions. This issue seems to be prevalent across industry segments and seems to be one of the bigger challenges a textile SME founder/owner faces when he/she is looking to grow their business.

The first challenge is to attract the right talent to their organization, the second is to ensure that this talented individual stays beyond one year in the company so that he can make a difference to the business results and third is for this person to take the required risk and ownership to ensure end to end completion of any task. Let us look at the third aspect and know more about the methodology to build this ability in the critical layer of leadership in the company.