Imagine a company town hall where frontline workers ask about capital allocation and middle managers offer ideas on long-term strategy. Or a supply chain team prompting resilience planning and employees at every level connecting their actions to value creation.
For many CEOs, this kind of engagement might sound aspirational, but at Ingersoll Rand, it’s our reality.
That wasn’t always my view of what leadership or engagement looked like. Early in my career, after completing a dual master’s degree at MIT, I took a job as an hourly supervisor in an aerospace factory. While many of my peers headed to investment banks or consulting firms, I found myself managing 16 frontline workers on the shop floor.
I thought my business school training — steeped in theory about lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, and waste reduction — would leave me more than prepared for the task. But I quickly saw the gap between theory and reality. Efficiency gains benefited the company, but for workers, it often meant fewer overtime hours and less pay. Management wanted tighter margins; employees wanted income stability. Incentives weren’t aligned, and behavior reflected that. I learned an enduring lesson: strategy alone doesn’t drive results. People do.
I took incentive alignment to its full potential in 2017 when, with the support of our largest shareholder, KKR, I instituted a broad-based shared ownership plan for every employee at the company I ran, Gardner Denver. From the manufacturing floor to the front office, everyone became an owner.
The shift was apparent. People had a stake in the outcome, and they acted like it. Ideas flowed more freely, teams spotted and solved problems earlier, and employees took pride in identifying and implementing improvements. For example, by training thousands to act as owners when managing cash — from inventory to collections — we built financial discipline into the culture.
Gardner Denver merged with Ingersoll Rand plc’s Industrial segment in 2020, and I became CEO of the new Ingersoll Rand, Inc., a global leader in mission-critical flow creation and life science and industrial technologies. Today, an ownership mindset now runs deep across Ingersoll Rand’s 21,700-person global workforce. And the results speak for themselves. Since 2017, we have grown enterprise value by more than eight times. Attrition has reduced and our safety performance exceeds world-class standards. Employee engagement has climbed to the 90th percentile.
When people understand how their work drives the company’s value, they act like owners: they innovate, they solve problems, and they stay.
Beyond our high-energy town halls, I see this ownership mindset in action every day. Employees go above and beyond by making extra sales calls, improving factory throughput, and resolving customer issues quickly. Ideas surface from every corner of the business and translate into real results, including meaningful cost savings. In one case, an employee identified a way to produce a critical part on-site, saving labor, turnaround time, and waste.
Our sales teams now position shared ownership as a true differentiator, telling prospective customers that our service technicians are owners and that the quality of service reflects it.
The effects extend beyond the workplace as well. With their equity, employees have helped their parents pay off mortgages and have plans to make educational dreams come true. In Brazil, one employee used his equity to fund lifesaving medical care for his wife, including travel for surgery that would otherwise have been out of reach. Outside the U.S., employees have shared what it means to tell their families they own a piece of an American company, including the pride and sense of belonging that comes with it.
Skeptics often argue that broad-based ownership is too complex, especially in global industrial companies with a distributed workforce. We’ve found the opposite. With the right leadership commitment and execution playbook, it can be done anywhere. Shared ownership has boosted our company culture, bringing us together across teams and geographies. It is also central to how Ingersoll Rand operates and grows. In recent years, we’ve acquired more than 75 companies, many of them family-owned. Increasingly, sellers see our commitment to shared ownership as a signal of how we treat our people and steward long-term value.
Employee ownership isn’t a side program or a social experiment — it’s a leading business strategy that is good for the economy and good for workers. That is why I support efforts like Ownership Works, which helps companies across industries adopt shared ownership as a repeatable value-creation strategy.
When done properly, shared ownership aligns incentives and drives value. Investors benefit. Employees benefit. Companies become more resilient. As CEO, I am proud of my people and our world-class operations. We really are in it together and our culture, and outcomes, reflect that.
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