Article 4 of 6: Stop Owning Every Change Project Yourself

This article is part of a 6-piece TA Leadership Series: From Operational Recruiter to Strategic Talent Advisor. Link to the first article, the previous article, and next article.

If you own every strategic initiative, your team will remain an execution team

One of the easiest ways for a TA leader to keep a team operational is to own every project that sits outside daily recruitment. It often happens with good intentions. The leader has the experience, understands the wider strategy, knows the stakeholders and wants to make sure the initiative succeeds. As a result, they become the owner of the new sourcing strategy, the referral redesign, the job-kickoff project, the dashboard implementation, the ATS optimisation and the new hiring process.

The team participates, but participation usually means receiving tasks. Someone researches a supplier, someone updates a document, someone tests the new workflow and someone prepares data. The TA leader remains the person deciding what happens, sequencing the work, managing stakeholders and ultimately presenting the outcome.

And then we ask why the team is not becoming more strategic.

If you want people to learn how to think beyond daily operations, improvement projects are some of the best development opportunities you have. Unlike individual requisitions, projects force people to define outcomes, deal with ambiguity, coordinate stakeholders, make trade-offs and think about implementation. Taking ownership of those initiatives away from the team means taking away exactly the type of work that could develop the capabilities you say you want.

Give them the outcome, not the task list

Imagine that you want to improve referral hiring. There are two very different ways to involve a recruiter.

The first is to make it your project. You determine that the programme needs to change, design the approach, decide who should be consulted and create the implementation plan. You then ask a recruiter to benchmark three referral tools, schedule interviews with hiring managers and update the programme documentation. That recruiter may execute those tasks perfectly, but the thinking remains yours.

The second approach is to make the recruiter the owner of the referral improvement initiative. You agree on the problem and intended outcome together, but they now have to understand why referral hiring is underperforming, determine what information they need, speak with stakeholders, investigate the existing process and propose what should change. They have to work out whether the issue is communication, technology, incentive design, employee participation, process friction or something completely different. Now the work is developmental because the person is responsible for understanding the problem rather than only completing the activities you have already defined.

The same principle works for almost any TA initiative. Improving the job-kickoff, redesigning hiring decision meetings, increasing internal mobility, building talent pools or introducing better analytics can all become development vehicles when someone in the team genuinely owns the outcome.

Ownership does not mean abandonment

A common objection is that people may not yet know how to lead these projects. That may be completely true, but it is also the reason to let them do it. You would not expect a recruiter who has never managed a cross-functional change initiative to suddenly know how to scope one, build a stakeholder map, create milestones and communicate progress. The leadership responsibility is to coach them through the process without taking the ownership back.

You might help them clarify the problem statement, challenge the scope, think through dependencies or prepare for an important stakeholder conversation. If the initiative starts drifting, you can ask questions that help them recover. If they need access to a senior leader, you can open the door. There is an important distinction between supporting ownership and replacing ownership.

The moment the project becomes difficult, leaders often slip back into execution mode themselves because it feels faster. They rewrite the project plan, take over the stakeholder meeting or solve the problem directly. The immediate task may move faster, but the development stops. If the purpose is only to complete the initiative, taking over can seem efficient. If the purpose is also to build a stronger TA team, it is often the wrong trade-off.

Visibility is part of ownership

There is another reason I believe projects should be owned as far down into the team as possible: organisational visibility.

Suppose I lead a major change project as TA leader and one of my recruiters does most of the work. At the end, I present the result to leadership and say, “This could not have happened without Sarah. She did a fantastic job.”

That sounds like recognition, and it is. However, the organisation still experienced the initiative as my project. I am the person presenting the work, explaining the decisions and taking the questions. Sarah is the person I have publicly thanked for helping.

If I genuinely want Sarah to build credibility as a strategic professional, she needs to be positioned as the owner from the beginning. Stakeholders should know that she is leading the initiative. She should run the working sessions, present recommendations, communicate progress and eventually present what has been achieved.

That final communication is itself an important development opportunity because it forces someone to explain the work in business terms. What problem were we solving? Why did it matter? What did we change? What result do we expect? How will we measure whether it works? This is very different from reporting that a project has been completed.

Let projects teach strategic thinking

Strategic thinking is often discussed as if it were a personality trait. Some people are described as strategic and others as operational. I think that framing is too static. People become better strategic thinkers when their work repeatedly requires them to connect activities to outcomes, make choices and understand consequences. Project ownership creates exactly that environment.

Someone redesigning the job-kickoff process cannot only think about the meeting template. They need to consider the behaviour we want from recruiters and hiring managers, how the process connects to structured selection, what needs to be captured in technology, how people will be trained and how we will know whether the new approach is working.

Someone improving sourcing cannot simply pick new channels. They need to understand hiring demand, talent availability, historical channel performance, internal versus external delivery and how the sourcing approach connects to the timing and quality outcomes expected by the business.

That is why continuous improvement should not sit solely with the TA leader. A mature TA function creates opportunities for recruiters to identify problems, test better ways of working and contribute ideas that improve the wider operating model. Operational delivery remains essential, but it is strengthened when the people doing the work are also expected to improve it.

The TA leader still owns the North Star

None of this means the TA leader disappears from change. Someone still needs to own the overall direction of the function, ensure projects support the North Star (Consistently delivering the right talent, exactly on time in a cost effective manner) and stop ten people from independently changing the same process in ten different directions.

The leadership role is to create coherence. You decide, together with the team and relevant stakeholders, what the function is trying to become and which outcomes matter most. You maintain the rolling roadmap, help prioritise initiatives, manage capacity and ensure the different projects reinforce rather than contradict one another. Within that structure, individual people can own individual changes.

This is also why project ownership connects strongly to Article 2, Make Them Kings and Queens of Their Domain. Authority within a business area and ownership of improvements are two versions of the same leadership principle: responsibility needs to be real, not symbolic.

It also connects directly to Article 6, Would You Show This to the CEO Right Now? Once someone owns a change initiative, the standard of their communication needs to move beyond internal task reporting. They need to understand the audience, the decision required and the business outcome the work is intended to create. If you want strategic talent advisors, stop keeping all of the strategic work for yourself. You may move slightly slower on the first project, but the person who owns it will be far more capable on the second. After several cycles, you are no longer the only person in the team capable of leading change, and that is exactly the point.