Ownership: whose career is it anyway

I put this to a group recently and asked them to think about their last one-to-one with their line manager. Was it them who set the agenda? Was it their manager? Or was there no agenda at all, just the regular weekly catch-up, whatever comes up comes up? The answers split roughly the way I’d expect. One for the team member. One for the manager. The rest, no agenda at all. Control, and authority, unclear at best.

That’s the third structural reason these conversations fail to change behaviour. I call it ownership.

The same two people, the same room, a completely different conversation

If your manager books the one-to-one and sets the agenda, the conversation is something being done to you. You’re the subject of it. It’s happening to you, and you’re passive inside it.

If you book it and set the agenda, it’s something you’re doing. Your manager becomes one of several people supporting your career, alongside your learning, your mentoring, whatever else is available to you. It’s active. You’re the one making things happen.

It’s the same two people, in the same room, and it’s a completely different psychological position. If I’m driving the agenda, I get to talk about what I actually want to talk about, and I get to ask for honest feedback on it. That’s a very different feeling to being told what today’s conversation is about.

This only works if managers treat it like a client meeting

I’ve watched this fail in practice, even in organisations that genuinely tried to make it work. Tell people to own their career, set their own meetings, bring their own agenda, and here’s what actually happens. They set the meeting with their manager. Their manager reschedules it. Then reschedules again. Then cancels.

That’s a real problem, because if the organisational message is own your career, and the lived experience is being deprioritised by the very person you’re meant to be driving the conversation with, people disengage even faster than if you’d never asked them to own it in the first place. The rhetoric becomes visibly false.

The fix is straightforward to describe. Managers need to treat these meetings the way they’d treat a client meeting. You wouldn’t cancel on a client. You might say you’re terribly sorry, something’s come up, can we find a time that works for both of us, and then you’d absolutely turn up to that rescheduled meeting. Treat your team like your client, and ownership has a chance of landing. Don’t, and the words own your career mean nothing.

This needs to be modelled, not just instructed

I was working with a leadership team in Chicago earlier this year, relatively newly formed, and one of the things that came out of their offsite stopped me in my tracks a little. Their leader hadn’t realised her own team weren’t having regular one-to-ones with each other, horizontally, across their peer group. She said, this is ridiculous, I sit with my peers every week so I know what’s going on across the business. Why aren’t you doing the same with each other?

And her next line was the important one. This is what I do. I prioritise these conversations because I think they matter, and I need you to do the same. That’s role modelling, not instruction, and it’s the difference between a policy that sits on a page and a behaviour that actually spreads through an organisation.

If meetings like this are going to be a genuine priority, that has to start at the top and be honoured by people at the top. A CEO who cancels their own one-to-ones undermines every manager below them who’s been told not to.

What actually helps

Walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Whatever your phrase is for it, whose career is it anyway or something else entirely, it only works if managers behave as though their team members are their clients. You don’t cancel on a client unless you’ve mutually agreed a replacement time, and then you honour it.

Before your next appraisal cycle begins, ask yourself three questions. Is your feedback secretly contaminated by reward? Does the individual genuinely benefit, not just the organisation? And who is really driving the conversation, you or them?

Bringing the three together

Contamination, value and ownership are three separate diagnoses, but they show up in the same thirty minutes, in the same conversation, in every organisation running a performance cycle right now. None of them are fixed by better training in how to give feedback. Each of them needs something structural changed in how the organisation runs the conversation itself, which is exactly the territory our Giving and Receiving Feedback and Crucial Conversations programmes are built to address, alongside the wider work in Improving Performance Through Conversations.

If you recognise any of this in your own organisation, I’d genuinely like to talk it through with you. Get in touch and let’s start that conversation.