对于大多数员工来说，工作是他们养家糊口的方式；对于大多数老板来说，员工就是为自己干活的人而已。如果你也有这种想法，那么很遗憾你离成功的距离还很远。对于员工和老板来说，只有真正"拥有"了工作，才能打开通向成功的大门。

Taking full responsibility for your work -- that's a new hire's most valuable attribute, one that can't be bought or trained.

I was speaking to a group of soon-to-graduate MBA students recently, and one asked me this: What's the most valuable attribute of a new corporate¹ hire? I had to think for a moment.

"Can we leave out ethics²？"I asked. That got a big laugh.

No, I said, what I meant was: Can we assume that the person is highly ethical³ and then choose the next most critical attribute? Yes? Well, then I'd say: Ownership.

UNPLEASANT SURPRISE. Ownership? I don't mean that the new hire has to own anything in particular -- a decent suit or a pair of shoes. I mean ownership of the job, meaning the instinct and the drive to take on its responsibilities -- completely.

The MBA students had to chew on that for a minute. But any CEO or senior leader knows what I mean. Any experienced exec has at least one story about turning to a lieutenant⁴ during a crisis and getting an unpleasant surprise. "What's your plan?" they may have asked, only to hear:

"Well, I think that's Johnson's department."

"I really don't have experience in that sort of thing."

"It's not in my budget."

"One of my team members was supposed to handle it."

"My dog ate the presentation."

You get the picture. This is when managers find out, in the most inopportune way, that they have a lieutenant with an ownership problem.

A NATURAL QUALITY. Is ownership the same as taking responsibility? Yes, except that ownership means taking responsibility to the nth degree. People who'll commit to that extent don't even think about whether they're taking a little, a moderate amount, or a lot of responsibility.

When you own your job, you simply do whatever needs to be done. And you own it, or you don't. You may be willing to share credit for successes -- let's hope so, if you manage a team -- but you don't shy away from responsibility for failure. It's just yours.

You can't train this into a person, and you can't pay a person who's not ownership-oriented enough money to change. If you try, you may see incremental⁵ improvement. But taking true, gut-level responsibility for a job is a natural quality. It's one that, more than any other, can make the difference between the success and failure of your team. Ultimately, it's more important than industry experience, brains, technical skills, you name it.