How do you balance autonomy and accountability?

When it comes to getting this balance right, none of the other recommendations will work if you don't get this one right. If people aren't clear what is expected of them, it is completely unreasonable to hold them accountable. Furthermore, if you don't define "what good looks like" you will find yourself constantly chasing people around and getting into the weeds on how those outcomes are achieved. Giving autonomy will feel like an impossibility. This not only will burn your out as a leader, but suffocate your employees. While this is often a point called out in the discussion, it's often not emphasized enough how doing this well is a skill that must be developed. As a result, it's a skill that's often lacking in leaders.

What’s not talked about here is importance of setting challenging goals. Given that most goals are achievable, how will the goal allow the individual to demonstrate their ability that by going out of their comfort zones?

Chris nailed it. Most people are a walking bag of unexpressed, unverbalised expectations - they just assume other people know what they know, have the same experiences as they do etc etc and therefore assume others know exactly what they want, agree with and understand their definition of what good looks like, know all of the behaviours they expect etc And then what they do is blame them because they don’t give them the things they didn’t ask for. I cannot tell you how many times I have been in a conversation with a senior leader where they were expressing disappointment and I said “so why don’t you make it clearer what you are asking for and what good looks like” - it’s always the place to start - and it’s a highly undervalued skill.

Responsibility with humility is what I have found to connect with other leaders and allow them to screw up while owning it. Leaders who are accountable to themselves and promote independence and trust in their teams will be able to foster this culture for their leaders. The biggest opportunity I see is acting consistently with our words for people to deeply understand what we want to see in the organization. It’s also a topic to revisit and reflect on in the organization. It’s natural to shift one way or the other but to maintain a good and healthy balance, we can evaluate ourselves and our people consistently. Good luck out there!

1. Clearly Define Roles and Responsibilities: When teams understand their responsibilities sand how the work get’s done they are more comfortable in stepping in to collaborate. 2. Establish Effective Communication Channels: Create and infrastructure and flow for check-ins, questions, and new ideas. 3. Foster a Culture of Psychological Safety: The reality is, that teams will not share work if they do not have trust because they feel everything must be perfect. It’s stifling. 4. Recognize and Reward Collaboration: As leaders, we reward the behavior we want to see repeated. Following these steps, we can create a collaborative team environment where individuals feel empowered, engaged, and motivated to contribute their best work.

By being super clear with the expectations you create very clear boundaries. You then leave them to operate within those boundaries, ensuring you have the right governance to check performance is being delivered. If it isn’t - you progressively step inward & get progressively more interventionist where performance still isn’t improving (ie mix of support, challenge and intervention) If performance improves you progressively step back. It’s simple. The better they are performing the more you get out the way (without compromising governance) - the less they perform the more you get in the way. Delegate as much as you possibly can within the boundaries you have set, give them as much freedom as you possibly can, just maintain governance.

It is also very important to clarify if you are stretching them. I've had to dial back delegation intended to develop direct reports because they thought the world would end if they failed. Let them know the risk and impact of failure, but at some time an employee is going to work a critical project and they need to be ready for that.

Delegating effectively requires you to step back and not swoop in to save the day if things aren't done in exactly the way you would do them. How many times have you redone or "fixed" others' work? Be honest. Delegating effectively requires clear expectations, letting go of exactly how things get done, and providing follow up for next time on any place where you weren't clear in the first place.

It’s very important to view feedback as a gift. Feedback is an extension of relationship and opportunity to develop. In that way it’s important to give and receive feedback. Providing a built in cadence for feedback - such as at a weekly 1:1 can help make the process a bit more trauma informed rather than providing feedback at random or only once a year. Additionally, ensuring that feedback is balanced - highlighting areas to grow and develop as well as strength areas is important for protecting morale. If all of your feedback is negative it will negatively impact psychological safety and morale. If your feedback is only positive you will rob people of crucial opportunities to grow.

There must be a clear understanding that accountability feedback is not the same as autonomy feedback. Accountability is a corrective action. Autonomy is the ability to work and while holding yourself accountable for the end result. If we forget this nuance then feedback given around accountability will be ineffective. We have to coach our teams to have the power of autonomy, but we have to coach them to be accountable to the work process it’s two completely different things, and if we attempt to put them together in the coaching process, we lose the power that Coaching offers to drive accountability and create autonomy.

??It is important that the feedback is timely and specific. If you want them to act on it, don't wait for next performance review to tell them about it. ?? If you appreciate them, make to be be specific and tell them what you are appreciating them for and the difference they made on a project. this helps your team members identify and hone their superpower.

I need to work on this more. When you hire great, capable people, it is easy to assume they know it. I can do better here by asking how they felt the project went, challenges, etc. Then I can provide observations and notes.

It’s hard to see ourselves, we greatly benefit from the outside input from others, therefore in all cases it’s essential that we build high trust, high candour relationships. We cannot control if someone chooses to trust us but we really can do a lot to make that easier for them. Trust is hard - we have to give up control - to listen to hard to hear feedback - while - trusting the other. Ever had someone give you some “hard truths” - if you actually took it on board then you trusted them enough to hear it. We all need that, and we need to actively create environments like this. So often we fear bad news and expect good news in our performance reviews - we want that “good review” - leaders need to be able to dismantle this expectation.

Every time that I start a new project with a new group of resources (including global ones and hence different cultures and ways of conducting business), I like to highlight that I value and support transparency among the team, support each team member by removing blocks and ensuring that all voices are heard during meetings and even collecting feedback afterwards. Not everyone is comfortable expressing ideas in a large group setting, but I make sure, either concerns, risks or assumptions are shared. Trust and collaboration are easy to develop with transparency and by providing an environment with no bias.

There is nothing more empowering than knowing your "boss" is there to guide & support you, but knows you've got what it takes to figure out how to get the job done, and get it done well. Provide your team the tools and guidance they need, and then let them show you what they can do!

Learn from mistakes: Mistakes and failures are inevitable when autonomy is granted. Foster a culture that views failures as opportunities for growth and learning rather than sources of blame. Encourage individuals or teams to analyze failures, share lessons learned, and implement improvements.

My client who was just promoted to a cross-functional role; came up with the challenge. His direct reports were not listening to him. The key reasons being his now reporters have been his colleagues cum friends for the past 3 years. They were not able to grasp the fact that he has become their boss. This is a case where the organization and the person missed announcing the “new accountability” to the old set of co-workers. My client handled the situation by having an informal meeting. He acknowledged everyone's strengths -stories from the past 3 years, including his own. He assured them that he is still a friend and accessible; however, his new role will have new agreements/actions. How one communicates accountability is crucial.

Fostering a culture of autonomy and accountability is a continuous process that requires time, patience, and commitment. It's about creating an environment where team members feel trusted and supported to make their own decisions while understanding that they are accountable for their actions. By creating such a culture, you're more likely to have a motivated, engaged, and high-performing team.

Coming to terms with the reality that you don't have all the answers on "how" and recognizing that's a good thing is a hard thing for a lot of people to overcome. If you're responsible for leading others, remember, your role is to bring out the best in others, not be at the center of the stage.

Something else to consider along the lines of communication is the idea of promoting transparency. If done right, it will help improve trust, therein communication and better allow for the team to execute while holding them accountable without having to micromanage. One way as a leader that I've done to help this tactic, is to show my transparency by example by being vulnerable on anything that I may not know, understand or failed at.