Dear Executive: Autonomy is not Chaos

Dear Executive,

In the past 9 years of dealing with executives at many different companies -- many in growth mode -- they’re usually pretty clear in saying that things aren’t going as well as they’d like, things aren’t getting delivered, and they’re aware that most people are increasingly unhappy at their company. In fact, sometimes they’ve done the famous surveys and found that engagement is very low. Attrition is rising fast. They know they need to innovate to stay ahead of the competition, “be agile,” and now - “be resilient” as well.?

And when I mention delivering better products sooner, sparking innovation, higher engagement, agility, resilience, and building a closer-knit community at work - they all want those things. And they usually agree that fostering more autonomy at work is key, though sometimes they have seen what they feel has been “autonomy” result in things going “off the rails.”?

I’ll share common challenges I have seen, what autonomy really means, and why autonomy is not equal to chaos or “everyone doing whatever they want.” And I’ll leave you with a few tips I have that are absolutely necessary to foster autonomy. Because though fostering more autonomy is key to the future of your organization, getting there might require you doing things slightly differently.?

Cultivate true involvement over a false sense of progress?

Failure mode - “We don’t have time to involve people.”

I remember interviewing with an executive once who told me building things should be fun, and people should be happy at work. I responded, “this means involving people in decisions that impact them” and he said, “we are ready.” Fast forward a few months, and it was obvious this company wasn’t ready for that. The same executive who said they are ready to get people involved in decisions perceived that the company also needed to move fast, so there was no time to involve people. He, and the select Senior Leadership staff, made all the decisions for everyone. And as I was chatting with my coworkers about the changes, one thing stood out to me - it was a false sense of progress, since no one was aligned or had bought into the changes.?

I have many stories like this, where executives share the pressures they are under to “fix things” (especially if they are new to their role!) and to “move fast” under the pressures of market competition and the need to deliver more value faster to customers.

What to do instead: Listen before acting?

If this sounds like your executive leadership -- stop making surprise, big bang changes. Don’t make decisions in a vacuum or after hearing only from your peers. You likely don’t have all the information you need to make the best decision, despite your experience.?

What can you do instead? Open your ears and start taking notes. Hold a “Round Table” or “Ask Me Anything” with front line staff and listen to what is stopping them from being as successful as they can be at work. Far from being just complainers, you’ll find they are passionate about wanting to do great work. Hold improvement challenges or retrospectives at a regular cadence at all levels and make the actions visible to all. And make org changes incrementally with input where possible ... considering the end goal of delivering value more quickly to customers. It takes months to recover from the confusion and whiplash of a re-org*. Share the “why” and the vision for what great looks like. There are techniques to gather everyone’s voice in an organized fashion. Will it take a little more work and rigor? Absolutely. Will the payoff be huge? Yes! You’ll feel like you just won the lottery. And, I have to point out - if you have access to smart people (you know they are smart, because you hired them and they are still working there) who are willing to tell you what they think is wrong and how to fix it, you’d be silly NOT to listen to them. Check out the concept of the “iceberg of ignorance” - top leadership only hears and sees about 4% of issues in an organization.

As one example of getting people involved in organizational decisions that impact them, I was able to share the idea of team self-selection a few years back and a Director took me up on this challenge (he felt he was in a no-win scenario by trying to make everyone happy, so probably was a little relieved too that he had called me!). This Director wrote down the guidelines and guardrails for his organization in the wiki and shared them with his org. This group was to propose back to him their idea for how they would split the teams, with him giving final approval. Guess what? They enjoyed the challenge, felt trusted, made the same decisions he would have made, and their engagement and happiness went way up. They said, “no one ever asked our opinion before.” It was known as the happiest and most productive part of the organization.?The display of trust goes farther than you would ever imagine.

The display of trust goes farther than you would ever imagine.

Autonomy cannot happen without alignment

For autonomy at work to succeed, we need alignment. Without alignment, it is simply chaos (a state of utter confusion, as defined by Webster). And nothing great can happen when folks are going off in different directions with different goals and purposes.?Contrary to what some people think, autonomy inside an organization is not "do whatever you want" -- it is acting within the constraints of what the organization expects of people. And when goals and expectations are unclear, people waste time trying to figure out what to do.

“Autonomy needs governance.” - Jennifer Eolin, Agile Consultant & Expert in Storytelling??

Create alignment with organizational goals

Failure Mode - organizational goals are opaque to people on the front line

Create company and organizational goals that lead to customer outcomes. Make the corporate goals and strategy clear to all, make them visible and refer to them continuously. One way of doing this is via OKRs (the lowest level of OKR should stop at the team level, by the way). This sets the stage for all work aligning to the organizational goals. And, as I’m sure many people realized last year, annual plans are obsolete. Work from a stack-ranked list and do rolling wave planning, perhaps focusing on a quarterly cadence.?

However, just because organizational goals have been made clear, it doesn’t mean success is guaranteed. I remember how an executive was dismayed by the fact that his staff (all Directors) struggled to collaborate, even though the top-level goals had been made clear and they each needed people from the other organizations to succeed. People who are used to working in silos might find it hard to break down barriers and (for example) set up a cross-functional team that crosses organizational silos to deliver on a corporate goal. This is something a great facilitator or coach could help with. In the end, I advised him to be more explicit that they will have to find a way to collaborate more closely to deliver on the goal (and leave it to them to figure out how). They succeeded in doing this and the organization reaped the rewards by delivering on the goal, but also by strengthening cross-domain collaboration.

Define essential boundaries & constraints

Failure mode - No one knows who is responsible for which decisions or what constraints they operate under

Once you have defined organizational goals, it’s imperative to define boundaries. There are multiple kinds of boundaries in the workplace and making each of them clear is necessary. Most organizations don’t take the time to define these essential boundaries clearly enough.?

And when that doesn’t happen, people are confused about who can make which decisions, how they will get things done, and what authority they have. When authority is unclear, oftentimes no decisions get made for fear of making an unauthorized decision. (For more details, read my post on Structured Group Decision-Making Techniques.)

Boundaries should be open enough to generate self-organization, explicitly communicated, and carefully maintained… as well as respected. Decision rights for roles should be clearly defined, and everyone should be trained on decision-making frameworks and methods.?

One example of lack of boundary setting that stands out to me is when a new Director was hired and he began to dismantle the agile ways of working in a team. Instead of constraints and expectations set by Sr. Leadership that the organization works in an agile way, and secondly to allow the team to focus and take on the work the way they wished, he told the team to work on 6 different projects (each led by one person, so he could "hold them accountable" and "have a name to call out"). The people were miserable, and they certainly weren't a team anymore. The people who had been there longest and knew the most began to leave the company. He ended up leaving a year later - when the last original person from the team left the company. That team was never the same (as you can imagine).

Why you should care about nurturing autonomy?

Autonomy is the human need to feel self-directed.?

People have an intrinsic need to act as agents of their own lives. This does not mean people want to act without regard for others or independently of others, but rather that they want a say over what happens to them (have agency). This human need appears in research done by multiple researchers, scientists and philosophers (Hackman, Pink, Ryan & Deci, Kant, and more).?

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, argued that respect for autonomy flows from the recognition that all persons have unconditional worth, and each has the capacity to determine his or her own destiny. To not respect someone’s autonomy is to treat that person merely as a means to an end (that is, to use them to achieve one's own goals and purposes without any recognition of their own goals, values, or wishes.??

You might think that telling people what to do is not a big deal (it certainly seems easier sometimes than waiting for their opinions and thoughts), but removing human agency impacts the workplace in many ways, especially in today’s complex and changing world. No longer can one person (even a manager, or executive) know enough to make the best decisions all the time. It is important to involve people in decision-making… in order to arrive at the best decisions, to improve organizational performance, and lastly because it is the right thing to do - treating people better at work is a moral imperative.?

Treating people better at work is a moral imperative.

Dan Pink asserts that “the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

In 1976, Hackman & Oldham uncovered five core job dimensions required for employees to feel satisfied at work. One of these dimensions was employee autonomy. Hackman & Oldham found that when autonomy is supported, people feel responsibility for the outcomes of their work. They argued that this greater sense of responsibility boosts an intrinsic sense of motivation, and results in engagement - employees investing more energy into their role. And there are already numerous studies showing that engaged employees result in much better business outcomes.?

How do I know if my teams have enough autonomy??

How about asking them? You might want to try this autonomy audit from Dan Pink as one easy step. https://www.danpink.com/audit/?.

If you are struggling with these things, the Open Leadership Patterns, and a coach experienced in facilitation, can help begin to define the necessary boundaries and constraints with your staff.?

* Structure changes can create culture changes, but each time in the past 10 years where I have asked whether anyone has training in org design and has considered how work will flow through the value stream differently with these changes, no one has in fact considered them or knew the term value stream. In fact, this is why I decided to study org design. The folks implementing the change in the HR system tell me, "We just do what the execs tell us to do, no one here has any training in org design." A change to support hierarchies instead of the value stream won't improve delivery.

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References

1. Gagné, M., & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational behavior, 26(4), 331-362.
2. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American psychologist, 55(1), 68.
3. Open Leadership Network Patterns (2021). Openleadershipnetwork.com/patterns
4. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: (2009) The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books, New York, New York?