Are You the Delivery Person or the Owner?
- Dr. Elke Framson
- Aug 29
- 3 min read
Owning your communication is key to being a credible leader who can influence teams, partners, and clients. Simply delivering ready-made messages won’t do the job.
What’s Ownership in Communication?
Ownership means that the message is yours. That it’s authentic.
It reflects your values and your intentions.
It sounds like you and is consistent with how you communicate.
You can defend it. You can explain, why you chose to use certain words or structures.
You’re not just the person delivering the message, but the one who processed the thoughts that went into it.
If you’re a non-native English speaker who writes in English – emails, proposals, presentation slides, etc. – you’re probably using AI tools. Maybe you’re even relying on them for your daily work, whether you have the chat bot draft your messages from scratch or improve and refine what you wrote.
But there’s an invisible challenge with AI tools, and it’s tied directly to credibility, trust, and connection. It’s tied to ownership.
Ownership: Why Does it Matter?
The truth is that ownership doesn’t matter for everyone. It matters only if you care about credibility, trust, and your impact on others: if you aspire to lead teams, want to connect with partners, and need to persuade clients.
“I don’t feel it” – maybe you’ve heard that phrase. It’s an informal way for Americans to say that they’re not convinced of something, not connecting with it, and not able to muster any enthusiasm for it. If your words are not your own, your team, partners, clients etc. may have a hard time “feeling it”.
Instead, they may sense a disconnect between your message and your personality that will negatively impact trust and engagement.
The Mental Struggle of Writing
Formulating our thoughts often involves a bit of a mental struggle. Should I say it this way or phrase it that way? Can I say that or should I leave it out? Am I too direct or not forceful enough?
Without that mental friction, your own connection to the words you write (and speak) will weaken. This can affect your message in various ways. Here are a few examples:
If anyone asks you about what you wrote, you may struggle to expand, justify, or rephrase it because you didn’t build the message yourself.
If you deliver your words verbally, for example as a presentation, your delivery will suffer. Polished slides don’t make a great presentation. Only you can do that.
The tools you use may reshape your message in unintentional ways. Stylistic changes suggested by AI can subtly alter the meaning. Non-native speakers have a harder time detecting these changes or understanding their impact on the message recipient.
Do You Need to Stop Using AI to be Authentic?
Absolutely not!
There are three basic ways to remain the owner of your message:
Learn and apply the principles of good writing. These are essential skills and techniques on the word, sentence, and paragraph level.
Always draft your own messages. Only you can access your mind and pull out the ideas.
Learn to prompt AI in a way that doesn’t erode ownership but enhances your message – with you in control.
To learn how this works in practice, join me for my course at Stanford Continuing Studies "AI-Enhanced Business Writing for Non-Native English Speakers", an online course you can take live (starting on Sept. 29, 2025) or asynchronously from anywhere. Click this link to find out more.
Looking for a personalized one-on-one solution? Email me for a complimentary discovery call on your needs and goals.
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