The Perfect Office? — Part 2 (Autonomy)
In the last piece we took a journey through a work day with Bob. We saw how changing a few cultural components at a leadership level resulted in some profound gains in Bob’s life as a whole. Today we’ll dive into an equally important part of the “perfect office:” autonomy.
Joining Bob back at his culturally improved office, we see his productivity has dramatically increased. He’s getting great sleep and is experiencing a passion for being in a more flexible and culturally rich workplace, but things can get much better. As it sits now there is a chain of command for almost everything he has to do. I imagine many of you experience this in your workplace in some capacity, but how would you feel if this never existed. Of course every company needs a skeletal structure, but hot take #2, no one needs a boss!
Sounds a bit crazy, but follow me on this one. Do you like someone telling you what to do? …Probably not. Some may say they don’t mind it, but over time it adds up. This is where you might see someone in the office just go off the rails at someone for holding that in for so long. Do you feel like if people just let you do your thing, tasks would actually get done faster with high quality?….. I would bet that most of you would feel that way. Do you think given the freedoms listed above you would take more pride and responsibility in your work?… I think that’s an easy yes. So why on earth is this not the standard?… Control? Ego? Greed?…To be frank it doesn’t matter, as there is no good reason.
Employers act as if they need to micromanage every aspect of their employees’ work experience in the fear that the company will derail if they don’t. It really has an inverse result as people fail to be able to focus on the largest scope for which they are responsible. This goes all the way up the ladder and I find this to be detrimental to any kind of scalable growth. If your leader isn’t able to have the space to be visionary and progressive, then how will the people below them grow? They won’t. Micromanaging feeds a culture of resentment that will only lead to overall poor retention, unnecessary toxicity, and a long “death by 1000 paper-cuts” list of problems.
Back to Bob, whose company has had a progressive change of heart and is adopting a more autonomous hierarchy structure. Bob is now fully responsible for his own schedule and workload. What this has started to create is a demand for Bob to seek out a more intimate knowledge of his process and projects. As no one is creating his work opportunities he has to create them himself. So now Bob not only has a stronger knowledge overall, he has gained the skills to allow whoever was creating his work opportunities to focus on a new employee or create larger higher minded opportunities they were previously too bogged down to even think of. Suddenly the company is robust enough to start to scale, which is the goal of every office.
Who would have thought that letting go was one of the keys to achieving a more perfect office? (to be continued)
