Ownership Thinking: How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose, and Profit

Cultural Considerations of ESOPs

Remember that merely creating an ESOP in your organization will not create an ownership culture. One of the best examples of this that I can give you is a client I first worked with in 2005, an international technical engineering consulting firm that focuses on commercial building systems. At the time, the company was over 50 years old and had been 100 percent ESOP for many years. The ESOP was put into place by the founder of the company, who clearly had good intentions and perhaps meant the transaction to be a magnanimous gesture to the employees. He was known to say that the employees did not exist for the benefit of the company, but rather the company existed for the benefit of the employees. Employees became ...