Leading with Autonomy

Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives.

Mastery – the desire to get better at something that matters

Purpose –the need to serve something better than ourselves.

Leaders who create environments that provide these characteristics also find self-motivation, drive and creativity.

Leaders vs Managers

Leadership is hard work and it’s not something that most companies teach. It evolves from our work experiences and interactions with others. How effective are we at communicating, influencing and motivating others? Sometimes managers are promoted to leadership roles because they are good at their job, yet their effectiveness as a manager does not readily transfer into being a good leader. The shift from directing others to accomplish a goal to coaching and enabling others to contribute to the success of the organization requires a great deal more personal and social competencies. It also involves stepping away from command and control and believing and trusting in the people with whom you work.

Simon Sinek author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action states  “When we tell people to do their jobs, we get workers. When we trust people to get the job done, we get leaders.” and “Unlike the job, leadership lasts beyond what is happening during the workday”

So how can you stop telling people what to do and start trusting that they will get the job done? How can you create an autonomous environment that does not lead to chaos?

MPS (Motivation, Performance and Satisfaction) Score

Increasingly, people are looking for more control and purpose over their work and work environments. They are looking for more autonomy, which has a direct correlation with engagement and happiness at work.

Some companies are using employee MPS tools to gauge employees satisfaction with their work and work environment. High levels of job performance and job satisfaction are predicted when there is a match between an individual’s growth needs or growth satisfaction from his or her work, and the motivating characteristics of the job being performed. These motivating job characteristics include 1) meaningfulness of the job (e.g. Is it perceived as being important, valuable, and worthwhile?); 2) responsibility (e.g. Is the job perceived as providing autonomy?); and 3) knowledge of results- (Is feedback regularly provided about how effectively the work is being performed?)

Knowing what makes employees engaged and happy is a start, but how do you then successfully create a work environment where people are driven and self-motivated?

Successful Autonomy at Work - 5 Key Ingredients

David Cancel, the former Chief Product Officer of HubSpot, shares in his podcast Seeking Wisdom, how HubSpot developed a work environment that promoted autonomy while simultaneously creating great products and achieving the highest MPS scores. The 5 key ingredients that accompany autonomy to ensure success are:

1.   Being Customer Driven – each person on the team and every team needs to be driven towards customer success and needs to spend time with customers continuously, from design of product, shipping, maintaining and enhancing product. The focus of the team should be to consistently wow the customer and to increase products usage and adoption over time. With the customer at the center, you are measuring how customer driven each team is.

2.   Accountability - autonomy without accountability is anarchy and you can drive accountability by using metrics based on the customer (e.g. customer satisfaction, use of product/service over time, referring of new customers, and etc.). If individuals and teams are not held accountable, when problems arise the default is finger pointing, which kills autonomy. If team members are dedicated to an outcome, then they have clear accountability.

3.   Transparency - over communicate goals, performance, ideas and concerns. Create opportunities for teams to regularly communicate what they are working on that is being used by customers. At HubSpot, they referred to monthly meetings where teams showcased their products being used by customers as “Science Fairs”.  Holding “Science Fairs” increased transparency and made people more comfortable when there was no clear roadmap.

4.   Having an Iterative Approach – listen to customers and iterate. Don’t wait for the one big product to ship to introduce a new feature or inertia will result. Certain features can be introduced to a subset of your user base, providing immediate feedback on what you’re getting right or wrong. The quicker you are out there iterating, the quicker you can learn because iterating includes both planning and talking with customers. Customers can’t tell you what needs to be built, you need to build it. Get it in front of customers and get feedback!

5.   Ownership – key to creating autonomy at work is building teams that have ownership. Ownership often regresses when companies move into a shared resource model (e.g. sharing designer, product manager, engineer). The model breaks because ownership and accountability gets lost. Keep teams small and focus on building more teams that have ownership.

Ideally, you want to create a work environment that promotes autonomy, mastery and purpose; yet, in addition to the ingredients listed above, you also need leaders who understand how to inspire others and who demonstrate predictability, benevolence and fairness. Leaders who know how to give people room to choose, act, explore and deliver.

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