Align Your Strategy and Build Autonomy

In yesterday’s newsletter we talked about how autonomy leads to more and better ideas. When you overcome your fear of poor results, and allow employees the freedom to solve problems and design solutions you multiply the wealth of ideas and innovation.

The other great benefit of that autonomy, is that employees begin to feel like they are truly making a difference to the organization. Empowering your team to use their own intelligence signals your trust and the degree to which you value their input. That makes for stronger teams, greater cohesion, higher retention and a built-in succession engine.

There is another critical benefit to widening the circle of people who can make decisions and solve problems.

Data?show that the more empowered employees are, the better the results they produce. But given the risk of failures and mayhem, what are the conditions that make it possible to grant autonomy to employees?

Simply delegating individual projects doesn’t go far enough. In order fully to get the benefit of your employees greatest contribution, they need to understand more than their own roles and those adjacent to them.

They need to understand the strategy.

Employee empowerment?succeeds where?there is strategic alignment.?What does that mean?

They need to understand not just the goals, KPIs and OKRs—but the whole strategy and how each piece of the organization fits together to produce the greatest value.

A single presentation or meeting isn’t enough to imbue strategy into everyone’s heart and mind. We all learn best by doing—not simply hearing or seeing a PowerPoint. So, ideally, your team should participate in the development of the strategy. Even if they are relatively low in the organizational structure, by crafting a strategy that can be mapped—you can bring them into the logic and structure of the strategic plan.

With that understanding, maybe individual teams can develop their own departmental strategy maps that feed into the various leading causes for key strategic initiatives.

By sharing the strategy and its logic, leaders can set the stage for a deep and broad understanding of the rationale behind the company’s plans. It starts with defining the macro goals and digging into thinking and documenting the theory of how to achieve them. That strategy should dictate the performance metrics for everyone. Those characteristics create both alignment to strategy and accountability for its success.

Without that kind of comprehensive plan and transparency, employees lack the context to make key decisions. Moreover, without that context, performance metrics tend to be shallow, and to force team-members to consider?gaming?the system to get the metrics – rather than to do great work within the strategy.

Once you have done that thinking and planning, include your entire team in it. Ensure they understand the principles guiding the strategy, and fully grasp the logical connections and relationships between all parts of the company. With that?understanding?their work will be guided by the strategy and its principles – and they will also understand the logic informing the metrics by which they will be assessed.

This works.?The greater the alignment between the macro thinking and the people and functions of the organization, the greater the amount of autonomy you can grant.

A Great Example

One company that is known for having done this successfully is Swedish company,?Spotify.?They embrace the notion of working hard on alignment and then granting the autonomy to teams to innovate. Although they have an unusual organizational structure, at its core, everything drives toward individuals and teams deeply understanding the strategy – and having accountability that’s tied to it. With that in place, autonomy is possible.?In Spotify, “[a] leader’s job is to figure out the right problem and communicate it, so that squads can collaborate to find the best solution.”

There are ancillary benefits to high alignment and high autonomy. One of the strongest reasons that employees feel?burnout?is because they lack control over their work. The corrective is greater autonomy – whether over the hours and place of work, or, over the way that work is executed. That self-determination is so critical that survey data from?CitiGroup?suggested that many employees would theoretically take?up to a 20% pay cut?in exchange for greater control over how they work.

How can you expand your team’s autonomy? Start with the building blocks of alignment: a clear, logical strategy, metrics that flow out of it, and constant communication and education about it. Then experiment. Let your team surprise you!

The best strategies are built with the assistance of expert facilitation and a methodology that produces something you can easily drive throughout the organization, to get the kind of alignment discussed here! Schedule a call with me to discuss your organization’s approach to strategy and discover what’s possible with Beyond Better’s partnership.