The Art Of The Art Is Picking Your Limits - 3 Steps For Leaders To Empower Their Employees
The Art Of The Art Is Picking Your Limits - 3 Steps For Leaders To Empower Their Employees
Inspired from Seth Godin, author of "Tribes"
Why is autonomy relevant in a company transformation?
Whenever a company goes through a transformation, a big change, or a merging of two parts of the company, the leaders and the employees experience in some moments, a lack of autonomy.
Leaders because in some situations there are top-down decisions that they cannot explain to their employees or even disagree with. Employees because they are constrained to do the work without sometimes having even an argumentation of the “why” and just HAVE to do it.
Here are some scary statistics of what happens when autonomy is lacking in companies:
Autonomy is also one of the buttons of the SCARF model and if you do not know how to handle it, it can create statistics like the above ones in your company quite fast.
Why does picking the limits of autonomy make sense?
For some people having full autonomy and no limitations might be scary. Because of how they are built as persons, previous experiences, beliefs, and so on.
For others, it’s the beauty of life for some time. In other moments, this can lead to burnout and going down the hole.
The art is in finding the balance of autonomy I would say, like in a lot of other things:)
What are the 3 steps to give autonomy as a leader to your teams?
Empower decision-making: Allow employees to make decisions relevant to their tasks and roles.
Provide Clear Goals and Flexibility in Execution: Set clear and achievable goals, but let employees decide how to reach those goals.
Encourage Innovation and Creativity: Create an environment where new ideas are welcomed and experimentation is encouraged.
Bottom line:
Giving autonomy as a leader to your teams is crucial for creating a psychologically safe environment where mental health and performance are at their best. Finding the balance of how much autonomy is given in which situations while meeting your people's psychological needs is the art here. This is why leadership emotional sustainability is so relevant to make all of this happen.
Tell me in the comments what is your experience related to autonomy.
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Andra
