Every leader wants to maximize the efforts of their people, but most don’t understand how to do it. One of the key ingredients to enhancing employee performance is autonomy. Leaders have a great deal of power over the conditions that impact their employees’ performance, and ensuring employees have autonomy is the best way to maximize the impact of their effort.
According to author and educator Kendra Cherry, we have a sense of psychological freedom, control and choice when we experience autonomy. Instead of feeling as if outside forces direct our behaviors, autonomy allows us to feel like we have a sense of power and control over our own destiny. Employees who are trusted to execute on their own will not only produce far better work but also feel a stronger sense of connection to their output and effort.
Leaders have the power to foster autonomy in their workforce. Writer Stephanie Pappas believes the most motivationally beneficial leadership style encourages employees to manage their own workflows and empowers them to solve their own problems. Providing employees with the freedom to make decisions within their authority and work toward an assigned goal without direct oversight is the best way to drive more autonomy and allow your employees to find what they’re capable of. But first, leaders must set conditions that allow their employees to work autonomously.
Setting the conditions for autonomy
As a leader, you hold a great deal of power over people’s lives and their well-being, as they spend close to 50 percent of their waking day at work. That’s a lot of power, and with it comes an even greater responsibility to provide an environment that prioritizes autonomy. There are four key elements you can provide for your employees to foster an environment that prioritizes and encourages autonomous work. These are clarity, competence, authority and measurement.
Clarity
There are two types of clarity you must provide for your employees to set the conditions for autonomy.
Big picture: First, you must provide clarity on the position and its purpose in the organization. In other words, why was this person hired to do this job? How does it help the company achieve its long-term goals? If you can’t answer that as a leader, you need to reevaluate why the role exists at all.
Task-oriented: Next, share clarity on each task, including what must be done, at what level of quality, by when and using the assigned resources in order to meet the intent given by the manager assigning the task.
Task-oriented clarity, combined with an understanding of the big picture, is what drives decision-making and autonomy at the individual level. For example, you may have assigned an employee to complete a spreadsheet, but they don’t know how to use a specific Excel formula. If your employee is still asking you what to do, it’s likely because you haven’t given them the proper tools for autonomy.
But if you show them what resources and points of contact they have access to, and offer a solid deadline, they can use those resources to learn how to use the formula. So, you could assign it this way instead: Complete this spreadsheet accurately by next Monday to ensure we have the correct t-shirt sizes before we place our order. You can reach out to John in HR if you need help pulling any reports, or Joanne on our team if you need help with using Excel.
Now, the employee can more easily complete the task without feeling like they need their manager’s help—this only reinforces that employees can and should work autonomously in the organization. Providing clarity on every task is essential. You can’t do it once and stop; you have to continually provide detailed assignments that give your employees the information they need to operate autonomously.
Competence
Competence is the ability, skills and knowledge to complete the assigned task successfully. A manager can assign a task that they know their employee has the competence to complete, but if that task is too easy, an employee can get bored. Conversely, if a task is too hard, your employee may give up. You should never assume your employees want to give less than their best effort, so if they’re struggling, it most likely means they still need some additional training at this stage (assuming you’ve given them clarity on their role and the assigned task).
Understanding the level of competence of your employees is critical because it allows you to tailor the tasks you assign them. Leaders should try and assign challenging tasks to employees that stretch their capabilities but aren’t too challenging so that it leaves the employee unsure of what steps to take.
Authority
Now that you’ve clearly assigned a task to someone capable of achieving it, you must also give them the authority to act, make decisions and complete their task. This may mean you need to provide them with approval authority to select a new vendor, purchase additional resources or hire a new team member. Authority exists when someone can decide on their own without seeking approval first. You need to ensure your employees can make the necessary decisions without seeking your approval.
Delegating authority gives your employee the means to work autonomously without your oversight, and it also shows your employee that you trust them and their decision-making capabilities. This will give your employees more confidence, which will help them work without your direct guidance. Even though you won’t be looking over your employees’ shoulders, you still need to develop a good measurement process.
Measurement
As a leader, you need to measure the success of your employees. That means you must observe and evaluate their process for how they achieved their results. Only evaluating the finished product is a poor excuse for a performance evaluation. You can’t coach somebody unless you know how and why they do what they do. This means you must evaluate their process and provide feedback on the process, not only the outcome, so they know exactly what parts of their process they need to iterate and improve upon. You can then give them greater autonomy to develop these skills and try again on the next project. Continue this cycle of evaluation and feedback to foster autonomy and increase your employees’ impact.
The most important part of this process is giving your employee another chance after you provide feedback. You must give your employees a chance to fail, learn and improve. As a leader, you must be willing to spend time coaching, developing and evaluating your employees. The best leaders are the ones who can foster performance growth.
Give your employees the gift of autonomy
Employees are more likely to succeed when the workplace conditions are set up to foster autonomous actions and give them control over their daily activities. Providing clarity, developing competence, granting decision-making authority and measuring the thought process behind each action are the processes for fostering an autonomous workforce that takes ownership and drives its own activity toward the assigned goals.
