Balancing autonomy with accountability

This is topic that we had today in #ani ( Agile network India ) online event in Jaipur chapter As a panelist , I am here presenting my thoughts .

Autonomy

Just think about the culture of the team , the organization . Is your organization sharing space for employees to experiment or controls the ways they work ?

Autonomy is how employees feel when they are trusted. A person’s motivation balloons when in self-control. By feeling in control of their own destiny, employees are more motivated and productive at work. Due to covid19 , now more employees are working remote . There was an initial inhibition that work may be affected as you cannot monitor the team . This has been overcome by seeping the trust in the teams working long hours from home balancing the personal and professional life. Remote workers are trusted by deisgn thrown by the pandemic and it is now accepted as the new normal .

AUTONOMY is promoted by OPEN COMMUNICATION , TRANSPARENCY , TRUST. Hence there is a culture aspect to it , mindset of leadership. Daniel Pink has given us the secret to motivation in his book "The drive". It's his autonomy mastery purpose framework. In situations where people are paid fairly, this framework -> drives, engages, and stimulates us to do our best work.

OWNERSHIP brings ACCOUNTABILITY

What is Accountability ?

Decentralize decision-making Knowledge workers themselves are best placed to make decisions about how to perform their work. —Peter F. Drucker . The scaled agile framework (SAFE ) also promotes this principle . Having clarity of goals , vision and making the desired objectives , outcomes as part of that is leading to accountability .

The larger goals of enterprise have to be percolated to teams by the PMO , the leadership and that defines the scope the teams have (WHAT TO BUILD ) . These teams decide HOW to build and then integrate the work product to aggregate at LARGER level closer to enterprise mission , vision . Idea is to get the LOCAL optimization and merge for GLOBAL optimization.

In SAFE , we have teams and these teams are part of some ART ( Agile release train ) .A train with direction but without tracks will derail and crash. We need to have some guardrails while teams are autonomous. So Accountability in the workplace is a system of aligning the enterprise goals and the teams' responsibilities. That is how the KPI are examined and readjusted each quarter to meet the goals set up.

Can there be a Balance always ?

This balance , depends on the context and industry , market we are operating in .

In highly regulated industries, the cost of noncompliance is often higher - pharmaceutical, medical device, aerospace and defense -there is fear of triggering an audit or violating regulations of country , domain , industry etc..Innovating in regulated industries takes longer than in other industries. People are uncomfortable with innovation in regulated industries. Regulations and handcuffed agendas drive the design quicker to raise red flags and barricad

As you can see in above we have 4 zones / quadrants between autonomy and accountability mix.

LOW ACCOUNTABILITY is not needed and HIGH ACCOUNTABILITY but low AUTONOMY can lead to bureaucratic set up. The companies looking to innovate must operate in the green zone ( High autonomy and High ACCOUNTABILITY )

Being autonomous is about delivering value in the shortest sustainable lead time requires decentralized decision-making. Decentralizing decision-making reduces delays, improves product development flow. As long as the desired outcomes are communicated clearly, then the paths towards achieving them is easy. The team is empowered to decide the means to achieve the end. Autonomous doesn't mean team can do anything it wants, but rather it works well within system/ environment.

Role of Management in this quest for balance

Management just changes from a role that allocates work to people and then manages their progress, to a role that focuses on growing people, providing ecosystem to thrive and enabling the systems to allow teams to work and have liberty to speak up , ask and innovate When accountability always overrides autonomy, there’s little incentive to innovate. The leadership's role and view , organization structures , HR practices and learnability of the organization is to change if this balance has to be arrived at . The PMO must be a servant leadership and glue the top management and the teams on the ground.

Alignment of metrics and transparency of data by dashboards is the another key .

What are the organizational goals, what are the individual’s goals, and how can they align properly? This is a prerequisite to learning how to balance autonomy and accountability, and it’s hard to learn how to do it without commitment and practice. That’s what leadership coaching is all about and needs cultural shift .

Challenges in this quest for balance

Personal agenda , inter business unit competing objectives , authority and conflicting interests in the enterprise will erode the balance and sustenance of this balance will not be possible . So , the balance is dependent on the ecosystem and culture set up the leadership.