🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
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🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
“Work is love made visible.”
— Khalil Gibran
Gibran didn’t say work contains love, or work requires love. He said work is love, made visible, made real.
As leaders, we get to decide how many people around us get to experience that… and how often. And what an awesome opportunity that is!
📥 Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
Even if you’ve never heard the term IKEA effect, you’ve almost certainly felt it.
It’s that disproportionate pride you feel in the bookshelf you spent three hours assembling. The slide deck you labored over for weeks. The initiative that was your idea from the start.
In 2011, researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely discovered something fascinating: people consistently place significantly higher value on things they helped create… not because those things are better, but simply because their effort went into them. They named it the IKEA effect. Labor, it turns out, leads to love.
And for leaders, this changes everything.
When people build it, they believe in it.
Think about the last major initiative your organization rolled out. Was it handed down all polished and complete? Or were the people most affected by it invited into its creation?
The difference isn’t just philosophical, it’s neurological. When people have a hand in building something, they develop a sense of ownership that no email or presentation can manufacture. They’re not just implementing someone else’s vision. They’re protecting and championing their own.
This is why top-down change so often stalls. It’s not resistance for resistance’s sake. It’s that people were never given the opportunity to own anything.
But here’s the provocation leaders rarely sit with:
The IKEA effect doesn’t just apply to your team. It applies to you.
The strategy you designed. The process you built. The solution you arrived at before anyone else was in the room. You are not a neutral evaluator of those things. You assembled them. You love them… perhaps more than they deserve. 😬
The most honest leadership question isn’t why won’t they get on board? It might be am I overvaluing this because I built it?
Co-creating with vs. creating for
That small preposition carries enormous weight. Creating for people, even with the best intentions, keeps them as recipients. Co-creating with them transforms them into contributors. And contributors don’t just comply. They commit.
But co-creation only works with the right conditions.
Here’s something IKEA understood long before the researchers named the effect: you can’t just open the box and dump the pieces on the floor.
What makes IKEA work isn’t just the assembly, it’s the instructions. The step-by-step guidance, the pictures, the structure make the process feel navigable rather than overwhelming. Without that, the furniture remains unassembled and useless.
The same is true for leaders. Inviting people into co-creation without structure, constraints, or a shared vision for success isn’t empowerment; it’s ambiguity that creates chaos. And chaos doesn’t build ownership. It builds anxiety.
The most effective leaders do both: they open the box and they provide clarity. They bring people into the problem with enough context to engage meaningfully… a clear challenge, some constraints, a picture of what a successful outcome could look like. Then they step back and let people build.
That’s the sweet spot. Not here’s the finished table. Not here’s a pile of wood and some screws. But here’s what we’re trying to create… now let’s figure out how to build it together.
If you’re interested in learning more, here are two resources worth checking out:
🎧 Hidden Brain — Why You Love That IKEA Table, Even If It’s Crooked (NPR) — the original research, beautifully explained
🎧 The Brainy Business — The IKEA Effect and Effort Heuristic — the leadership and change management application
🌀 A Dose of Action
The IKEA effect isn’t just something that happens to you… it’s something you can deliberately design with the people you lead. Try one of these this week.
🎈 Small — Float the Balloon
Before your next decision is fully formed, bring someone in early. Not to approve it… to shape it. It might sound like: “I’ve been thinking about something… can I run it by you?” or “What am I missing here?” Low commitment. Informal tone. But the early voice it creates? That’s the seed of ownership. And it costs you almost nothing.
🛠️ Medium — Co-Construct the Criteria
Before your next project or initiative kicks off, resist the urge to arrive with a plan. Instead, arrive with a question: “What would ‘great’ look like when this is done?” or “What would we want to be true when we get there?” Let your team help define success before anyone starts building toward it. People support what they help define, and they’ll know it when they see it because they described it themselves.
⚡ Big — Audit Your Culture of Ownership
Look honestly across your team or organization and ask: Where do people actually get to build things? Where are they only ever recipients of decisions made above them? Consider one structural change — a standing working group, a pilot with real autonomy, a process your team owns from start to finish. What people make, they protect. What they protect, they improve and sustain.
In case it’s helpful… “Float the Balloon” is the next in my Small Practices, Big Impact: Ripple Leadership in Action series. Watch for that blog post later this week.
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
Melody
Founder, Culture of Belief
PS: Every year… 🏀😭🗑️
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