Ownership at SoSafe – A conversation with our value champion Isa

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“Ownership” is one of the four core values at SoSafe and an integral part of our culture. It describes how we work, treat each other, and achieve our goals. Taking ownership can mean a lot to different people. One of our Safeys who embodies this value exceptionally well is Isa, one of our value champions for “Ownership”. We sat down with her to learn a bit more about what this value means to her.

Can you give us a short introduction of who you are?

Hello, I’m Isa from Marketing and I’m the value champion for “Ownership”.

What does this Value mean to you?

So what does ownership mean to me? It means a lot of things, but I think that one of my favorite definitions is going beyond the minimum requirements of your role and trying to see the bigger picture, to see where you can put your energy and your team’s and identify those areas that have highest impact.
It also means being empowered to take initiatives, make decisions, but also, and this is really important, to realize your mistakes, learn from them and take ownership instead of deflecting the blame. Apart from that, I think that it’s also super important to treat the company’s resources, whether it’ be people, money or tools as if they were your own.

How do you live this value in your work life?

I think that there’s two elements for those tasks where you are the owner and then those that you are not the owner. When I’m the owner, I always try to make sure that all the team members that are in this project know about their responsibilities. I try to document everything and use the company’s channels to make sure that we are all updated and that we all know what we have to do. Apart from that I try to remove any bottlenecks. So if we are like getting stuck, I try to really make sure that we solve the problem and that everyone can then continue.

And then apart from that, I would say when I’m not the owner, it’s very easy to say, “okay, that’s not my responsibility, I just let someone else like try to solve it.” But that’s not true because you’re also part of it and that means that you’re sharing the ownership, and that means that if I see that something is also stuck, I would talk to the person that I believe is the owner and if there are no owners, then I would try to come up with some solutions with the rest of the team. And if I feel that everyone on the team is putting so much energy and effort into it, but there are no defined goals or we don’t know the scope of it, I challenge the idea and I try to redefine the scope with them or even try to really reconsider if we should do it or we should focus our energy in other high impact projects.

Can you share an example that illustrates the positive impact of this value within SoSafe?

I think that ownership, if it’s only lived by a few people instead of being part of the culture of the team or the organization, can fade away when you are under a lot of stress or when a lot of new changes are coming to the team.

And as the whole GTM organization is growing and we are welcoming a lot of new people, we are redefining the structures within the whole organization. It’s super important that ownership is part of the culture that we breathe so that we make sure that all the projects go on. And I say that because right now we are having many more projects than we had last year and they are even bigger in a scope.

We believe that we cannot do everything alone and that ownership needs to come hand in hand with trust and delegation. We have hired so many talented people here at SoSafe and it’s so amazing to learn from each other. I think we we just need to delegate whenever we need to, focus on the areas we we want and ask for help because we’re in this together – and that’s what ownership means to me.

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