4 The KPI trap: "They Just Don't Take Ownership."

Does this sound familiar?

How many times have you heard—or said—"I can't delegate more to my people. They just haven't shown the maturity to take ownership and go the extra mile"?

How often do you get dragged into a production issue, only to waste an hour listening to explanations that don't add up, while your superintendents shift blame and deflect?

It’s frustrating. It feels like you’re the only one trying to hold the whole operation together.

But what if that "lack of maturity" isn't a failure of your people... but a direct result of the system they work in?

We've Trained Our Teams to Play Defense

For decades, we’ve managed our mines with a simple formula: give everyone an individual KPI and hold them to it. It sounds logical. But we're all living with the toxic results.

This system has trained intelligent, capable people to focus only on their own numbers, even at the expense of the entire mine.

The result?

• Problems get "thrown over the wall" to the next department.

• Trust is eroded, and no one feels safe enough to tell the real truth.

• Meetings become a battlefield.

This is the real source of your frustration. Your team is stuck in a pattern we all learned in school:

Debate.

In a debate, the goal is to win. You defend your position as the only truth , find flaws in the other person's argument , and depreciate their position to make yours look better.

Does that sound like your last production meeting?

This is why you see blame and deflection. This is why you don't see ownership. Your people are just playing the game according to rules they did not create—a game where protecting yourself is more important than solving the problem together.

From Debate to Dialogue: The Shift That Changes Everything

What your operation desperately needs is to move from Debate to Dialogue.

• Debate assumes one person is right.

• Dialogue assumes everyone holds a piece of the answer.

• Debate is about winning.

• Dialogue is about collective understanding.

  
  

Dialogue is where the magic happens. It’s the skill of influencing another person by first demonstrating you deeply understand their position.

Think about it. The moment someone feels truly heard by you, their defensiveness vanishes. They stop using the classic shield, "You just don't understand," and they actually become open to a new point of view.

When dialogue takes over, the entire energy of a room changes. The conversation becomes animated, energized, and even suffused with laughter. People build on each other's ideas instead of tearing them down.

This is the culture you've been looking for. This is what "ownership" actually looks like.

The Flow Room: Your Environment for Real Change

Here’s the hard truth: you cannot train your way to this culture. Sending your superintendents to a "communication workshop" won't work. They'll come back to the same broken system, and the old habits will return in a week.

To get lasting change, you must change the environment itself.

This is the entire purpose of the Flow Room. It's not just another meeting. It's an operational system designed to make dialogue and collaboration the path of least resistance.

Here’s how it breaks the old patterns:

1. It Creates a Shared Goal: The Flow Room uses Theory of Constraints to focus everyone on the one thing that matters: the performance of the mine's critical bottleneck. Competing, siloed KPIs are replaced by a single, collective goal.

2. It Makes Dialogue Structural: The daily, 30-minute, forward-looking format—What threatened the constraint yesterday? What could starve it today? What can we do to protect tomorrow's flow? —naturally forces a shift from blame to collaborative problem-solving.

3. It Replaces Blame with Help: This is the most critical shift. The Flow Room operates under one non-negotiable rule:

4. 
   

Blame is not for failure. Blame is for failing to help or ask for help.

This one change makes it safe to be transparent. It becomes in everyone's best interest to be honest about real weaknesses and actual forecasts, because they know they won't be punished for failure—only for failing to cooperate.

Stop Trying to Fix Your People

The maturity, capability, and capacity you’re looking for already exist in your team. It’s just buried under the noise of a legacy system that forces them into self-preservation.

You don't need to fix your people. You need to fix the measurements that's holding them back.

This transformation can't be delegated. It must be personally championed by you, the most senior leader. You have to be the one to have the individual conversations, explain why this is necessary, and ask your key players for a committed three-month trial.

You can't persuade them with arguments; they have to experience it.

The question isn't whether your team can step up. It's whether you're ready to create the conditions that finally allow them to.

If you’re ready to stop managing blame and start leading a team that truly owns its results, it's time to talk. Contact Stratflow to learn how to launch your first Flow Room.