If you want your employees to be motivated to do their best, and if you want them to be the most valuable asset on your balance sheet, then let them feel and experience ownership in the organisation. Effective managers make every employee feel like a business partner. Why? Because when people feel ownership of something, they look out for it.

Encouraging an entrepreneurial mindset goes beyond profit sharing and stock options. It’s a motivating attitude instilled in others by you, the manager. We see this attitude demonstrated and translated into profits in companies, such as Hewlett Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and hundreds of smaller companies, where employees are motivated to take exceptional pride in their work because they’re treated like business partners, not hired help.

How do you create such an atmosphere of entrepreneurial attitudes and pride? You begin by understanding and acknowledging that employees today want a say in how the organisation is being run. Their input can be extremely powerful, especially if they know and understand how the organisation operates. By the way you interact with employees, you can help them begin thinking as entrepreneurs and feel more accountable for the organisation meeting its goals. To succeed in todays rapidly changing work environment, employees need to know far more about the organisation than just how to do their specific jobs. So you must help workers better understand the entire organisation, gain a clearer perspective of how the orgaisation operates, learn what the competition is doing, and develop the ability to take intelligent risk and be creative. In other words, you need to help employees take full advantage of their human capabilities to perform at high levels.

There are five steps you as a manager can take to help your employees think and act more like entrepreneurs on the job:

1. Explain the organisation
2. Demonstrate how the organisation operates and generates income
3. Help your employees understand the competition
4. Encourage intelligent risk-taking
5. Inspire innovative thinking

If you want your employees to put more of themselves into their work, help them find more of themselves in it. This is likely to be a small step for your employees, at least in theory, because people who do a job typically want to feel like it’s more than a job and like they’re more than just part of a machine. For you, on the other hand, this step may be a little more difficult. Keep in mind then, this is the basic idea: if you want your employees to be motivated to do their best, help them feel as if they control their jobs, as if they belong to a community, and - most of all - as if they own a business.