Paving the Way
Autonomy
"Autonomy isn't the opposite of accountability - it's the pathway to it"
- Daniel H. Pink -
Autonomy is the capacity to act independently and make our own free choices. This sense of autonomy is tightly connected to a sense of ownership. If we feel a lack of autonomy on the job, it can show up as not being fully engaged, holding back on challenging assumptions, and withholding the important creativity and problem-solving abilities we were hired to demonstrate.
People who have autonomy:
- Learn from experience.
- Attack harder things on a regular basis and gain competency from the learning.
- Strive to be able to step up and have the courage to do so.
- Take responsibility and ownership when it’s clear no one else has and yet needs to happen.
- Push back on standard operating procedures when they see the faults and create better solutions.
- Request more freedom over the work.
The willingness to step up is key. To keep talents, skills and wisdom hidden when it has a chance to make a difference, deprives the team and the community. It takes courage though to demonstrate autonomy . When unsuccessful, challenging assumptions or making mistakes can sometimes damage your reputation. Tread carefully but proceed boldly.
By carefully choosing when and how to use autonomy , people will find they have more success than failure. They will have more freedom and control on their job. They will reduce their overall anxiety and stress. And they will likely feel more engaged. All of this is good for the people and good for the organization.
How to develop autonomy
- Develop your own autonomy
- Allow the team to take risks and learn
- Entrust decision making to your team
- Information sharing
- Challenge the team
- Back the team
HOW TO DEVELOP AUTONOMY
The key question for leaders to consider is how much freedom and control they actually provide to individual employees. And how much overall tolerance they have for risk taking and trying things in a different way. If you find yourself hearing (or saying) “That’s not how we do things here,” you are demonstrating lack of tolerance. Lack of tolerance undermines autonomy and leads to demotivation and apathy.
There are a couple of steps you can take as a leader to develop autonomy in your teams:
- Develop your own autonomy
Role modeling autonomy is a prerequisite to develop autonomy in your team. - Allow the team to take risks and learn
Many managers say they want their employees to be curious and experimental, to take the initiative and develop solutions. This is however often negated by the need to control outcomes through safe and predictable processes. The way to encourage a team to be more innovative is to shift from a static, “best practices” mentality to a dynamic, “laboratory” mentality and to make each team member, not the manager, responsible for the results. - Entrust decision making to your team
As a leader, you can define the decision making criteria and then delegate the decision making itself to your team. They will learn by doing – and sometimes by failing – and you can further increase the decision making capability of the team by reviewing some decisions and provide your guidance and perspective afterwards. - Information sharing
Make sure your team is aware of your vision and goals for the business. This encourages everyone to work together to achieve better results. Be transparent about the performance of the company and the team against the defined goals and about all issues and challenges the company and you are facing to deliver the results. And last, make sure your team has all the information they need to make decisions and perform their work. - Challenge the team
You can actively invite the team to come up with ideas for improvement, push back on standard operating procedures when they see the faults and to take responsibility and ownership to solve these. It can easily start with creating a list of operational issues and discuss the list during regular team meetings. Or, might one of the team members complain about a process or another function, ask the person to take ownership for analyzing and solving the issue. - Back the team
As the team will start to take risks, they will succeed sometimes and fail other times, make right and wrong decisions and might push too hard for improvement. In all these cases it is crucial for team members to know they will always have your back.
Content contributed by Helen Morley, 2021