Granting Autonomy to Your Team

Many people have fairly solid leadership skills. But those skills are put to the test in a continuous improvement culture. Typical leadership is not enough. The people in charge must exhibit improvement-oriented leadership.

This simply means that they not only guide people to accomplish today’s task, but also have to consider how they will do that task better in the future.

For many, the hardest part about changing the nature of their leadership style is learning to let go of control. That’s not to say they’re not still in charge. What it means is that they have to give autonomy to their team. They have to let their subordinates act independently and that often means allowing them to fail.

Not every project is going to go perfect. And while leaders can grant authority to their teams, they must still bear all of the responsibility for the success of the team. It can become a major hurdle for people to overcome, especially if the boss’s boss is highly critical of failure.

So, in a continuous improvement culture, the job of a leader shifts from telling people what to do to helping them choose the right thing to do on their own. That includes giving them the tools to make the right choices. And the truth is that failure is a great teacher. If a leader allows their team members to make mistakes and learn from them, that team member is going to be much more effective down the road. A leader’s challenge is to make sure that the mistakes are not big ones and are correctable.

Now with that said, there are several steps a leader can take to mitigate the impact of mistakes that come with autonomy.

1. Prepare people

The bulk of leadership should happen before a team member has to make a decision. It is irresponsible as a leader to just throw a subordinate into the deep end of the pool and hope he or she can figure out how to swim.

That person should have been trained along the way. They should be given little, but ever increasing, tasks to complete that forces them to build skills little by little. They should be tested. They should be trained.

The short of it is that leadership is about getting people ready to act independently.

2. Set the example

Leadership is extremely difficult if you demand on thing from your team, and do the exact opposite yourself. Leading by example speaks much louder than any words ever do.

Behave the way you teach, or your team will never behave that way either. And this does not just apply to leadership. If you want credibility, you have to follow all of what you preach. 5S is the biggest example that comes to mind. If your office or desk is disorganized and cluttered, you can’t really expect your team to believe what you say when you tell the about the importance of workplace organization to productivity.

They’ll do what you tell them to do, but the example you set determines how enthusiastically they do it, and if they go beyond the bare minimum.

3. Make sure people know the values of the company (and that they are real)

Most companies have some sort of list of corporate values. For many, this list is just tucked away in a binder somewhere and pulled out for company meetings. Sometimes, the list is posted prominently, but the values are foreign to people.

If you want people to be able to act in the absence of guidance, ironically, one of the indicators of the strongest leadership, then they have to know the moral compass of the company.

Some values are going to be generic, and should be a no-brainer. You might see things like respecting people, or putting the customer first. Those are universal values. But the ones that matter in decision making are the ones that guide direction. If innovation is part of the values in some way, make sure that your team feels empowered to use some resources for a bit of experimentation.

The bottom line is that when a person gets put into a spot where they have to make a tough decision, the choice they make should be in line with the values of the company.

4. Practice / Teach

There’s a balance between production and ‘sharpening the axe.’ If your focus is on creating product 100% of the time, that is the way you are always going to do it. Without budgeting time for improving people, they are never going to improve.

Make sure your production planning and staffing account for the time needed to coach individuals and to get them training.

5. Communicate. Give your rationale for decisions

When giving an instruction, many leaders get really irritated at being asked ‘Why?’ They see it as challenging their authority.

In reality, as long as it is done respectfully, and by that I mean the person being instructed is genuinely interested in understanding and not just resisting, then explaining is helpful for long term success. The next time a similar issue comes up, the person, if they know the thought process behind their leader’s decisions, can make similar decisions on their own. If the leader hides her rationale, then the subordinate will never learn.

6. Start small, but frequent

You’ve got to give people opportunities to put what you teach them to use. Start them off with small tasks. Kaizen events are a great place to do this. They’ll be put in a controlled environment where they have to come up with ideas and implement them on their own. There will be support if they need it, and lots of freedom to try (and sometimes fail) if they want to spread their wings.

The risk in a kaizen event is relatively low, but it can build a lot of confidence. See how they do with a little autonomy and keep adding progressively larger chances to learn.  And do it a lot. Once you find a person who wants more out of their job, feed that desire.

7. Give feedback without consequences (except for misconduct)

Part of learning is hearing what went wrong. But people don’t want to get in trouble. So, if they think they will get penalized for mistakes when they try to take on more, they will be extremely reluctant.

Make sure that people feel like they can try new things, and as long as they take reasonable steps, they are safe from consequences. They should know if they are not following processes, or if they are doing things completely unauthorized, then they will get in trouble. This doesn’t mean people trying to learn independence get a free pass. It just means that if they took reasonable steps to try to succeed and things went sideways, they have to know you’ll look at it as a learning opportunity and not a chance for a reprimand.

8. Be a mentor

Great leaders spend a lot of their time developing people. When they have a lot of pressures on them, it can be hard to find that time and can make the leader distractible. Mentoring is important, though, so make sure to commit time to it on the calendar. This goes hand in hand with granting people autonomy. The more people are able to operate independently, the more strategic time and personnel development time a leader will have.

Mentorship can be particularly hard to commit to, as it is often done for people outside of the direct chain of command. It creates a safer environment for the mentee to ask questions and admit shortcomings in a way they might be afraid to do with their own boss. Top executives may have to help create these relationships, and make sure that there are no mentorship freeloaders, meaning that no leaders have their team members matched up with a mentor without providing a similar service to someone else.

9. Reward success-often means losing good people

The challenge with making people outstanding performers in their jobs is that they soon outgrow them. As they become more confident and more competent and have a greater skillset, the challenges that their job offers them will likely not be enough to keep them interested for long. The people who crave autonomy and work hard to get it are also the people who need a lot of mental stimulation in their job.

The problem is that this often feels like leaders invest huge amounts of time in someone, and they want to reap the benefits of that investment. Unfortunately, that’s not how developing people works. Once you get them outperforming their job, the right thing to do is let them move on to bigger and better things. Hopefully, that is still in your company. It is nearly always best to hire from within.

Resist the urge to fight to hang onto your best people. It hurts their career path, but it will also get you a bad reputation. It will be slightly harder to coax people to work for you if they know you won’t be all in on helping them progress in their career. The opposite is also true. You can get a reputation as being a cultivator of talent. That will get people lining up to join your team.