One of my favourite questions to ask a leadership team who has brought me in to help them figure out how to fix a lack of ownership in their cross-functional teams is, “Who actually owns this?” That’s when things start to unravel real quick because people point in all sorts of directions. 

That’s usually the exact moment a CEO, a COO, a CHRO or a chief transformation officer, whoever booked me into the room, realises the “lack of ownership” they called me in to fix isn’t actually about ownership at all.

I ask a different question next. Has anyone actually been given ownership of this outcome, or just the job of knowing what’s happening to it while it quietly goes sideways? That distinction is where the real diagnosis sits, and it’s almost never where the room starts looking. If you want to know how to fix a lack of ownership in cross-functional teams, the honest starting point isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a role that was never actually built, dressed up to look like one that was.

Quick scope check before I go further, because I don’t want you diagnosing the wrong thing. If someone isn’t taking responsibility for work that’s clearly inside their own role, that’s a different conversation, and a shorter one. I’m talking about the harder, messier version: capable people working across functions, where everybody owns a slice of the work, and nobody owns enough of it to actually move.

This sits inside a bigger pattern I write about a lot: cross-functional execution, where decisions get made in the room, everyone nods, and nothing visibly moves because the outcome lives across functions that all report somewhere else. This piece zooms right in on one thing: the single named human being who’s supposed to be accountable for an outcome end to end, and what happens when an organisation appoints that person and hands them absolutely nothing to work with.

Most “Ownership” Problems Are Actually Authority Problems in Disguise

Most executives already believe in accountability. They’ll say so, warmly, in front of the whole leadership team. Then, in practice, they appoint someone to track a cross-functional outcome, sit them in a working group with peers from three other divisions, and quietly treat the tracking as the ownership.

It’s the corporate version of handing someone the car keys and telling them they’re responsible for how fast the car goes, except they don’t actually have the keys. They’ve got a really good view of the speedometer. That person can see the problem with total clarity. What they can’t do is change it, because changing it means changing what another function does, and they’ve got no standing to ask for that. So call it what it actually is: ownership with no authority attached. It looks like ownership from across the room. Up close, it behaves exactly like no ownership at all.

Coordination Feels Like Ownership. It Isn’t.

Coordination means you’re responsible for knowing the status. You chase updates, you build the slide, you can explain, in painful detail, exactly why things are stuck. Ownership means you’re accountable for the outcome itself, with the standing to change what happens next.

Think of the difference between a really good travel agent and a pilot. The travel agent can tell you exactly why your flight’s delayed, who’s holding it up, and roughly when it’ll leave. What they can’t do is fly the plane. Organisations routinely hand someone the travel agent’s job and put “pilot” on their business card.

This is where end-to-end ownership gets confused with end-to-end visibility, and it’s a confusion that survives for years because it looks so reasonable on paper. A person can see a cross-functional initiative with total clarity and still have zero ability to redirect a single piece of it. Taking ownership of outcomes, as opposed to narrating them beautifully, requires a lever. A dashboard, however good it looks, was never going to do the job.

The Job People Quietly Turn Down Without Ever Saying No

I want to be generous here, because the usual explanation, that people dodge accountability out of a lack of courage, is wrong far more often than it’s right. People decline ownership quietly, through hedged language and slow-walked commitments and a suspicious number of “let me circle back” emails, because they watched what happened to the last person who accepted it without authority. It wasn’t cowardice. It was maths.

Call her the Nominated Lead. A genuinely capable senior manager gets asked to coordinate a cross-functional outcome touching three divisions. No budget. No authority to touch another function’s sequencing. A fortnightly steering committee as her only lever, which is a bit like being handed a whistle and told to direct traffic from the footpath. For eleven months she produces beautifully written status reports about a problem she has no power to solve, watching the same two rows stay red on a tracker that nobody with actual authority is reading closely. When the executive sponsor finally asks, in front of the room, why this still hasn’t moved, she’s left explaining, again, that the two functions holding it up don’t report to her and have other priorities this quarter, and the quarter after that. The organisation called this ownership. It was coordination wearing ownership’s name tag, and everyone in that room, including her, now knows exactly what that name tag is worth.

Give the Job to One Name. Never One Function.

Who should own a cross-functional outcome? The biggest function, the most affected function, or someone else entirely? I’d bet on someone else entirely, every time. The biggest function tends to own it in name and quietly run it for its own convenience. The most affected function is usually too close to it to see past its own constraints, like trying to read a map while you’re standing on it.

A single accountable owner works best when they’re chosen for judgement and standing, not which budget line they happen to sit on, and when the appointment is a named person. Never a committee, never a function. Committees are democracies, and democracies are brilliant for electing someone, terrible for making a call by Thursday. Functions default to their own priorities the moment things get tight. A name on a role is the only version of this that survives a genuinely difficult quarter.

The Three Things an Owner Actually Needs (Not the Two Most Leaders Hand Over)

Once you’ve got the name, the fix is unglamorous but specific. Give that person three things.

First, authority to change sequencing inside functions that don’t report to them, at least for work touching this outcome. Second, a standing route to the executive who can break a tie within a week, not at the next scheduled leadership meeting. Third, a performance conversation of their own that explicitly includes this outcome, so it’s not moonlighting on top of their real job for the privilege of being blamed later.

Miss any one of the three and you’ve recreated what I call Ownership Fog: every task in a cross-functional initiative has a named owner, and the outcome itself has none. Naming a person without these three things doesn’t close that gap. It just gives the gap a very tired face.

Say the Authority Out Loud. In the Room. In Front of Everyone.

The three things only work if they’re said publicly, in front of the functional leaders whose sequencing can now be overridden. Said quietly in the corridor afterwards doesn’t count. A private arrangement between the owner and the sponsor isn’t authority, it’s a secret, and secrets have a habit of surfacing at the worst possible moment, usually the first time it works against someone’s own priorities. Nobody thanks you for that kind of surprise.

This is where an outside voice tends to earn its place in the room. I’ve watched a single external session do what an internal announcement almost never manages: name the authority gap out loud, to the whole group of functional leaders at once, so it never has to be negotiated privately, function by function, by the new owner alone, hoping someone eventually says yes. When a business books a speaker to fix stalled cross-functional projects, this is usually the actual moment they need help with. Not motivation. The public act of making a new owner’s authority real in front of the people whose behaviour now has to change because of it.

The First 48 Hours Are the Whole Test

I apply the same test throughout this work, and here it lands on the appointment itself, not the eventual outcome, months down the track. The instant you name an end-to-end owner, the organisation starts watching, quietly, to see if it’s real. Something has to visibly change inside 48 hours, in a function that doesn’t report to the new owner. A sequence reordered. A queue reprioritised. A recurring meeting cancelled and replaced with one they actually control.

If the first 48 hours produce nothing but an introduction email and a new calendar invite, every functional leader now knows the truth, and word travels fast: this person has a title and not authority, so every future request from them can be safely, politely, permanently deprioritised. That first visible change isn’t symbolic. It’s the entire currency the owner spends from for the rest of the assignment, and there’s no topping it up later.

What a Real Owner Does in the First Two Weeks

In the first fortnight, before anything that looks like a plan, a real owner does three things.

They use the authority once, deliberately, on something small enough to be low risk and visible enough to be noticed, because the organisation needs proof before it needs a roadmap. Proof beats PowerPoint every single time. They sit down with each functional leader whose work they can now redirect and agree exactly where that authority starts and stops, so it’s not tested by accident in week six by someone who genuinely didn’t know. And they get properly clear on the system they’re now operating inside, who actually holds which decision, which is exactly the territory I cover when I talk about how to close accountability gaps in organisations. The research backs this up from the other direction too: where accountability is low, the cause is usually the structure people work inside rather than the character of the people in it, according to MIT Sloan Management Review’s work on team accountability.

None of this needs a new framework or a redrawn org chart. Fixing a lack of ownership in cross-functional teams comes down to something much smaller: one person named, one thing said out loud about what they can now do, and one thing that visibly changes inside 48 hours to prove it wasn’t just talk. Most leadership teams already know who that person should be. What they haven’t done yet is give them a job worth accepting.

If you’re about to name a single accountable owner for a cross-functional outcome and you want the room of functional leaders to hear the authority made real, rather than have it negotiated privately afterwards, one function at a time, get in touch about bringing me into the room for that conversation.