Take ownership. But don’t take too long.

You want people to listen to customers. They want to avoid a telling-off for taking too long.

Say you’re leading a project to improve customer service. You’re coaching advisers to listen and take ownership, but their managers still challenge them whenever calls run over the target time.

An adviser can understand exactly what you want and still worry about getting into trouble for doing it.

Nick Chater and George Loewenstein describe two ways of framing a problem: the i-frame focuses on changing individuals; the s-frame focuses on changing the conditions around them. Their work concerns public policy, but the distinction is useful here.

Through the individual frame, we might decide the adviser needs more coaching. Through the system frame, we’d also look at the call-time target and how managers respond when helping a customer takes longer.

That means the project has something to investigate beyond whether people understood the training. What are we asking them to do, and what are they criticised for doing?

It's why the Delivery Leadership System considers the conditions around people as well as their motivation. We can ask someone to take ownership and still make it a rather uncomfortable thing to do.