I have run leadership training at Indus Net Technologies (INT.) for years. We sent people to programs, brought in trainers, and ran workshops on decision-making and ownership.
The sessions were useful. They changed how people thought.
But training alone did not change how decisions actually got made inside the company.
People could understand ownership in a classroom and still operate inside a system where authority, accountability and outcomes were not clearly connected.
That was the real problem.
You cannot ask people to think like owners while designing the organisation around permission.
So we started changing the environment around them.
📍 Instead of giving detailed instructions, we started giving people a clear goal and more freedom to decide how to achieve it. 📍 We connected decisions to visible outcomes, so people could see the impact of the calls they made instead of discovering it months later in a review. 📍 And when something did not work, the first instinct was not to take the decision back. It was to understand what happened, learn from it, and let the person continue owning the outcome.
That changed my view of leadership development.
People do not become owners because we motivate them more. They become owners when the system gives them something real to own.
Over time, we extended that idea of ownership into equity as well. Many of our long-serving colleagues now participate in INT's growth through ESOPs . But for me, equity is only one expression of ownership.
The more important part came earlier: giving people meaningful decisions, clear accountability and the space to see those decisions through.
This is why I now look at org design before I look at the L&D budget. You can run the best leadership program in the world. But if every important decision still travels upward, the organisation will keep teaching people to wait.
The goal is not to remove leadership from the process. It is to make sure leadership is not the bottleneck in it.
What's one decision your managers should be able to make without your sign-off?