The 3 things required to make autonomy work

We are told that we need to give our employees autonomy. We are told that we are motivated by autonomy. But so often it fails to yield effective results for the organisation, and leads to frustration for the employee. Here are the 3 things you need to do to make it work.

Background

Dan Pink wrote in “Drive” about how knowledge workers are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Many of us crave autonomy, we want the freedom to determine how we go about our job.

At the same time, in order to navigate the complexity of our work environments, we are told it makes most sense to let those closest to the information solve customer and business problems. There is some strong logic here. We’ve all seen scenarios where managers with no context have made decisions that don’t make any sense.

But managers are often frustrated by the fact that giving autonomy leads to employees doing all the wrong things, or worse, doing nothing at all.

It motivates us. It makes us more effective. But it also fails to deliver value. That’s because there are 3 things that are required to make autonomy work:

• Alignment
• Capability
• Responsibility

So often this isn’t the case, and that’s what makes it fail.

Alignment

If you don’t have alignment in your organisation, then a group of autonomous teams will all be heading in different directions. This often results in the organisation going nowhere. We need to create mechanisms that ensure that everyone in the organisation is pulling in the same direction.

I’ve seen several instances where teams were given “too much” autonomy; they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted. Leadership bought in to the idea of autonomous teams, and they set their teams free. The teams decided what they were going to build, and set out to build it.

For example, I worked with a team that was responsible for “growing revenue”. But there are millions of different ways to grow revenue. So when the leadership realised they were heading in the wrong direction, they pulled them back and told them to build something totally different. The team was disempowered, and demotivated. The leadership was annoyed that time had been wasted. All benefits of autonomy were lost.

Leadership need to set clear outcomes for teams to drive, and then set teams free to decide what outputs to deliver in order to drive these outcomes.

When I talk about “outcomes”, I don’t mean “increase revenue”, I mean something more specific like “increase average revenue per paying user of android app”.

Every organisation (pretty much) wants to increase revenue. We need something more specific to create alignment. Leadership needs to make some strategic decisions about how to increase revenue. Then let the teams go design and build the best outputs (features/products/services) to deliver those outcomes.

There are several tools that we can use to create alignment in an organisation, whilst retaining autonomy. These include:

• Mission/purpose statement
• Vision
• Values
• OKRs

I believe you need all of these to get your organisation pulling in the same direction.

Capability

This one is fairly simple. Autonomy works best when the people closest to the problems are given the freedom to solve the problems, as they have the most knowledge about the problem. However, if they don’t have the capability to solve the problem, then they won’t be able to.

If we set a team some outcomes to drive, but they can’t figure out what outputs are best to drive those outcomes, then the autonomous team is going to fail.

If you have done a good job of setting measurable outcomes however, then you will at least have some data to show that the team is failing to drive those outcomes and create business value. This allows us to learn and adapt accordingly.

We need to hire people that are capable of making a plan to drive the right outcomes, and also capable of delivering that plan. If we don’t, then autonomy is not going to yield business benefits.

Responsibility

There are 2 angles to this. The teams need to be given responsibility by management, and the teams also need to accept responsibility themselves.

Firstly, teams/individuals need to be given the responsibility to make the changes they decide. You can employ capable people and align them to outcomes, but if they are dependent on other teams to deliver their plans then they will be blocked from delivering value. It starts to get frustrating for everyone concerned, as the capable people can’t do what they need, and the business doesn’t get any benefit.

People need to have full responsibility over the products/projects that they are expected to effect.

Equally, if you are given autonomy, then you need to be willing to take the responsibility of doing the work to drive the outcomes. I’ve seen several instances of people asking for autonomy, but when they were given it, they were surprised to find out that it meant that they had to do all the work! The reality is that having autonomy means you have to work hard. In the worst cases, people use autonomy to just do nothing.

You need people that are motivated by your company mission, and are willing to get their hands dirty.

Conclusion

Autonomy can be really motivating. It can lead to better outcomes for the customer and for the business. However, more often that not, it can lead to frustrated leaders and overwhelmed employees. If you want to make autonomy work, then you need to:

• ensure you create alignment;
• give autonomy to people with enough capability; and
• they must beready to accept responsibility.

Otherwise, you are set to fail.

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