Only 48% of employees feel they have control over how they do their work. That means more than half of the workforce operates without autonomy, often waiting for direction instead of taking initiative. But when individuals learn to take ownership, everything shifts. They make decisions with confidence. They hold themselves accountable. And they help create cultures where ownership and innovation thrive.
Co-Active coaching empowers this workplace transformation. Coaches help clients recognize and align their inner voices—instinct, emotion, reason, and intuition—so they can respond to challenges with clarity. At the same time, coaches practice self-management in coaching—a disciplined way of putting aside personal preferences and staying focused on client growth.
What Does It Mean to Take Ownership?
Coaching ownership means showing up fully—making intentional choices, recognizing the potential for impact, and staying aligned with one’s values. Clients who step into ownership are no longer passively responding to circumstances. Instead, they learn to lead from within.
This might look like a mid-level manager identifying cross-functional inefficiencies without being asked. They’re not just doing their job—they’re modeling leadership.
As one writer put it in her article about taking ownership at work:
“If you’ve ever heard the saying ‘dress for the job you want,’ taking ownership is like a more powerful version of that same strategy because you’re doing the work, not just dressing for it.”
When clients take ownership of their thoughts, emotions, and actions, they start influencing their environments rather than being shaped by them.
Why Ownership Matters to Organizations
When employees feel empowered to act with purpose and responsibility, they contribute to a culture of ownership. In these cultures, people are more engaged, perform better, and feel more fulfilled.
A global study of over 23,000 workers from Effectory found that 79% of employees with autonomy perform better on the job and are more engaged with their work.
And yet, 52% of employees say they lack a sense of ownership in their roles. That’s a massive opportunity for change. Coaching can help bridge the gap.
Coaching Clients to Integrate Their Inner Leadership
Clients often make decisions through instinct, emotion, reason, and intuition.
Each narrative offers insight, but none tells the whole story alone. Coaching helps clients identify which voice is speaking—and when it’s time to bring the others into the conversation.
Here’s a quick guide to the four internal narratives:
| The Four Internal Narratives | |||
| Instinct | Emotion | Reason | Intuition |
| Automatic, often unconscious responses to stimuli | Subjective feelings and mental states that influence perception and behavior | Conscious, logical process of thinking and problem-solving | A quick, insightful understanding that goes beyond conscious reasoning |
| Driven by survival needs or internal drives | Linked to thoughts, memories, and experiences | Uses evidence, facts, and logic to draw conclusions | Involves a “gut feeling” or “hunch” about something being right or wrong |
| Can be learned or innate (i.e. reacting to a threat) | Involves various brain regions, including the amygdala | Involves critical thinking and analysis | Can be influenced by hyperawareness and emotional sensing |
Once clients start to recognize which internal voice is leading, coaches can guide them to ask:
- “What’s another perspective I haven’t considered?”
- “Is my decision grounded in logic, emotion, or something else?”
- “Am I reacting, or choosing?”
This integration is where intentional leadership begins.
Example: Bringing It All Together
Imagine a client who leads a team of product developers. During a sprint planning meeting, a senior stakeholder requested a last-minute feature that risked derailing the timeline. The room felt tense, and the client’s heart raced as they fought the urge to shut the idea down or shift blame.
Rather than reacting, the client had the tools to explore their internal landscape:
Instinct
Their initial response was a classic fight-or-flight impulse. Heart pounding, they felt the urge to defend their team and push back abruptly.
Coaching prompt:
“What was happening in your body at that moment?”
Coaching insight:
The coach helped the client recognize this reaction as instinct—a survival mechanism kicking in. Awareness created space for choice instead of reactivity.
Emotion
Beneath the surface, the client identified frustration and a feeling of being unacknowledged. They’d worked hard to protect timelines, and the new request felt dismissive of that effort.
Coaching prompt:
“What emotion was underneath your urge to push back?”
Coaching insight:
Naming the emotion without judgment allowed the client to move from defensiveness to empathetic communication.
Reason
Once grounded, the client shifted into logical thinking. They assessed the real risks, evaluated options, and considered potential outcomes of accepting, delaying, or declining the feature.
Coaching prompt:
“What are your real options here, and what are the consequences of each?”
Coaching insight:
This reasoned approach brought clarity, allowing the client to lead a more productive team conversation.
Intuition
Finally, the client reflected inward. Their gut told them this wasn’t the first time a rushed feature had backfired. A calm but firm boundary would serve the project best.
Coaching prompt:
“What does your gut say—and what experience might that be based on?”
Coaching insight:
Tapping into intuition helped the client honor their leadership instincts while staying in collaborative dialogue.
This full-circle integration of narratives shaped the client’s response in the moment and provided a model for how they could guide their team to do the same. That’s how coaching for ownership creates ripple effects in culture.
Self-Management in Coaching: The Coach’s Role
While clients learn to lead themselves, coaches must stay grounded in self-management in coaching. In the Co-Active Model, this means setting aside:
- Personal opinions
- Emotional reactivity
- A need to be right or helpful
Instead, the coach becomes a clear, present mirror—one who listens deeply, asks powerful questions, and holds the client’s agenda above all else. Even in moments of tension or disagreement, the coach self-manages so the client can learn, grow, and take responsibility for their journey.
You may also like: Co-Active Coaching: The Proven Framework for Transformative Conversations at Work and in Life
Lead Your Clients to Exemplify Ownership Culture
Wrapping up the example above, the client could share what they learned with their team by modeling transparent decision-making, encouraging emotional check-ins, creating space for instincts and gut feelings, and guiding the team to use logic under pressure.
They might even begin incorporating self-management coaching prompts into team retrospectives, like:
- What assumptions are we making?
- What emotional undercurrents are influencing our sprint planning?
- Where might we be reacting instead of choosing?
This is how self-management in coaching becomes a culture-building practice. When clients learn to balance and lead their inner narratives, they naturally lead their external teams with greater empathy, clarity, and ownership.
Do you want to help your clients step into greater ownership while deepening your self-management as a coach?
The Co-Active Coaching Practice Space is a supportive place to refine your skills, stay aligned with the Co-Active Model, and grow alongside a global community.