I started in my career field in 2016 working for a locally owned business, that of which the business owner would usually work with us every day except Saturday and Sunday.
He was always full of motivational quotes and typical things you'd hear come out of an entrepreneur/business owner's mouth. If you've ever worked for someone who loves to use LinkedIn as a business owner, you probably know exactly the type of guy I'm talking about.
Now, if you don't know what an ownership mentality is, it's literally what the title says. You take over the business you work for as if you own it, but without the pay and hours and freedoms of a business owner. Essentially, they expect you to dedicate your life every day to making sure the business runs smooth and pulls a profit FOR THE OWNERS. Most business owners won't share a fraction past what you're usually paid for all the hard work you put in.
For the first 5 years of me being under him in this field, I'd always hear the same things. “You need to have an ownership mentality! This is YOUR business. This is YOUR store. Take care of it like it's you who owns you. Take ownership! Teach your employees the same!” It was like a broken record and he'd often use it to justify overworking me, underpaying me, not staffing us, etc.
Well, fast forward and the dude sold us to corporate. Immediately jumping into corp life, they started in with the same bs about having an ownership mentality. I cannot for the life of me stand to hear this bullshit anymore.
These business owners/corps want us, people at the bottom of the totem pole, to take ownership of a business in which we don't get to choose our pay, our workload, etc. and then get upset when we treat this as someone else's property.
Hearing this for 6 years at this point has built a little pocket of hatred towards those kinds of people that tell their employees that. The second I hear it on our meetings, I get disgusted and want to tell them to pay us like business owners if they want that kind of productivity out of us. What do they pay us though?
I'm one of the highest paid people in my position, sadly. That's not saying a lot. I make $40k a year. Even before we got sold to corp and we were still the locally owned business that we were, the owner told me he only pulled $60k a year for himself. So right there, dude was already making $20k more a year than me EVEN THOUGH we were a small business just starting out.
Corp is worth, as of 2021, $8 billion. They have refused to give me any raise higher than 60 cents, have fired thousands of people over the last few months, and are in the process of remodling and rebranding our business but they can't afford to up our wages in a time where inflation is killing the costs of everything. It's just insane to me. I can't even get a freaking whole $1 raise.
So, yeah, this whole, “ownership mentality” shit is bullshit. If you ever have a higher up tell you that, tell them to pay you like an owner or they get regular ole employee work out of you.