It seems that my blog on Autonomy within Boundaries hit a spot. I’ve had some interesting conversations following on from it. Most of which focussed around the need to articulate that with autonomy must come accountability. And it’s that balance that is the deciding factor in a companies’ success from both a cultural, people, behavioural perspective but often also from a commercial one.
So let's discuss that.
There is much research the shows how disengaged employees cost companies as much as $550 billion every year in lost productivity. As a result, frustrated companies focus on creating a culture of autonomy, because a high level of autonomy increases employee engagement and ownership of the work.
Employees that feel a high sense of ownership tend to be more productive, because they take greater
pride in their work. But the danger for these companies is discovering that their autonomous employees aren’t all on the same page. As a result, their work doesn’t align with the company’s vision. In some cases, their productivity suffers because they have too little oversight.
Other companies focus instead at looking for better ways to increase employee accountability. But increased accountability on its own creates a culture of micromanagement that leads to unhappy workers. This, in turn, has a negative impact on employee productivity.
The clear solution is to balance employee autonomy with clear and meaningful accountability. But how do you balance these two components?
“Autonomy isn’t the opposite of accountability – it’s the pathway to it.” — Daniel H Pink
Autonomy that creates ownership
Creating a culture of autonomy means that employees are given the freedom to determine how to reach the company’s goals, within established boundaries, as we discussed last time. To do that, you need a very clear vision and alignment on core values that are broken down into at least quarterly priorities.
These guide autonomy with a structure that gives people the alignment and vision they need. Structured expectations create a culture that allows leaders and managers to take an increasingly hands-off approach.
Accountability that's clear and meaningful
Employees want autonomy, but you might be surprised to learn that at heart, we also want to be held accountable. This starts to make sense when you realise that accountability gives you a way to measure success.
Whilst autonomy gives employees the freedom to own their work, accountability holds them responsible for results, and for the actions that produce results, and for remaining within the boundaries and aligning to the core values.
To be effective, employee accountability needs to be clear and meaningful.
Clear accountability - Expectations are communicated, observable, and measurable. Employees know exactly what success looks like, and there’s no question about whether their performance meets expectations.
Meaningful accountability - A specific, understood plan in place if expectations aren’t met. The plan for accountability should have the goal of helping the employee get back on track, but also provide clear consequences if improvement doesn’t occur within a specific time frame.
A balancing act that pays off
An essential counterweight to autonomy is strict accountability for results, and for the actions and behaviours that deliver those results. A company needs the following to achieve that;
Establish a strategy and purpose that provide context for employees’ actions.
Put the strategy into practice with measurable objectives
Consistent measurement of progress toward those goals
Feedback systems to monitor activities along the way
Appropriate consequences for reaching or failing to reach the goals.
At their best, companies realise that not everything is easily measurable, or should be measured, and that constant temperature taking and micromanagement are inefficient and demoralising. They establish transparent boundary conditions and clear expectations. Employees and teams know they will be held accountable, and they know where the guardrails are. They understand the objectives, and they have a great deal of freedom in determining how to reach them within those guardrails.
“People want guidance not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and the authority to act on it.” — Howard Schultz
Clarity of purpose and what is called high-resolution strategies, give people a clear view of where they’re headed, provide the compass that can guide the choices that teams and individuals make when working autonomously.
Balancing freedom to innovate versus following proven routines
The art and science here is determining how to get both outcomes — consistency and innovation — in the right proportion and in the appropriate parts of an organisation. In many areas, freedom to innovate is the critical need, but not all, and that’s ok. We need to apply innovation where it’s needed – so digital, technical or behavioural transformations require it – they need a higher speed of innovation so that works better in autonomous, small teams, with a lot of organisational agility. Other areas, however, benefit from standardised approaches. These are areas where consistent outcomes are essential and where speed of execution comes from deploying common methods, best practices, and enforced routines. The focus here should be on repeatability and efficiency. Each requires speed in different areas, innovation versus execution, and achieves these results in different ways.
The challenge in striking the right balance is to know which method should predominate and how to design appropriate ways of working for each area. The wrong approach leads to confusion over goals and to ineffectiveness.
Balancing alignment with control
This is closely related to the previous point. In traditional hierarchical organisations, managers direct the work of subordinates and thereby ensure alignment with broader organisational goals. Spans of control are limited to a reasonable number — typically eight people or fewer — so that managers can effectively oversee their subordinates’ efforts. This organisational model can work well in relatively stable business environments, where the pace of change is modest and where annual planning cycles suffice for managing strategic changes and course corrections.
In dynamic business environments, where innovation cycles happen in days or weeks rather than months and years, and where much of the work is cross-functional in nature and is undertaken by small, agile teams, this type of organisational model can be slow to respond and innovate.
Companies that take the approach of empowering autonomous teams must find ways to ensure that coordination and connectivity happen among those teams without relying on controlling managers. Again, it is a matter of managerial art as well as science to achieve alignment without excessive control.
The company Spotify is heralded across many industries as an example where this has been embedded into the very core of their operating model with squads, tribes, chapters and guilds designed specifically to embody the balance of autonomy and accountability. I attach a case study to explain how they’ve executed on this.
In many companies, divisions have tried to adopt this approach – but often unsuccessfully – due in no small part to the fact that it is not systemically embedded throughout every single part. As soon as you have to leave your model to achieve something – be that funding, risk, governance – the benefits erode as the autonomy fades. This is often what drives the frustration that lead to the disengagement that it’s set up to solve. The vicious cycle kicks in!
AUTONOMY
Set the vision & mission
For people to feel engaged with their work, they must believe in the vision and mission for the company. This is something that is easily palpable when you find it. Uber is held up as a perfect example - there all understood the vision for the company and how it was making a real impact in world. The energy was palpable. The mission for each division was very clear.
Typically, setting a compelling vision and mission for a company is more difficult and takes some deliberate work to form it. The larger company the harder it is. That’s where divisional vision/mission become important to define. In my experience where companuies have worked hard to define both of these, and we share them with every new joiner – it is not clear that people factor them into their autonomous decision-making, or that the wider company remember them when they set ever increasing expectations on us without clear articulation.
Regardless of the specific product that your team works on, you need to be able to paint a compelling story to your team and of your team about why the work that you do is important. You should also be able to articulate the interesting technical, product, business or design challenge that is being solved by your team. Work on it until it is crystal clear and easily summarised to anyone curious.
Get out of the way
When I think of the managerial roles i've held, I find it helpful to think of it more as a consultant than a decision maker. There are times where we need to make a decision because it is high risk or we need to unblock progress, but people on ours team shouldn’t feel like they need us for their day-to-day work.
That said, they should know they can reach out for advice or input at any time. There are often lots of different ways to accomplish most things and part of the work as a leader is to help people fully vet their ideas and choose the option that they believe the most in, even if that is completely different than how you might have solved the problem. This is certainly the style of leadership I try to embody.
Transfer of control
Most high-performing employees crave autonomy and some level of control. Regardless if you are managing engineers, designers, PMs, sales people or other managers, to get the best from your team, they need to have enough space to make decisions and own their success (or failure). By allowing the team and individuals to drive their own priorities, innovation will thrive and goals will be more likely achieved.
This doesn’t mean that there can’t be company-wide goals or an occasional top-down initiative, but what teams are expected to achieve and deliver on in a given time period should be driven by the team and people actually doing the work, not from leadership. Leadership should be focused on clearly communicating the big picture strategy, the vision and mission and then be asking the teams and individuals for a plan to get there.
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” — Steve Jobs
This relinquishing of control can be tough. The tendency can often be to get into the weeds to help solve the problem, see how things can be done faster or how we can do more with less.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Planning
Accountability starts with a plan. At Amazon, they are very good at having team and group leaders create written half-annual plans that are reviewed with leadership at each level. Once plans are discussed, debated and committed to, the teams had the autonomy to execute. There are check-ins along with way to report status and make adjustments, but the ownership of the plan itself and decisions that are needed to be made are left with the team.
This process works really well to keep everyone aligned on the strategy and priorities. At Nationwide there isn’t a formal company-wide approach, but within Cloud – as a leader of the transformation we do this quarterly with PI Planning. We just need to get the wider organisation aligned so the scope and priorities aren’t constantly interfered with by external factors.
Goal Setting
One of the most classic and often underused tools to help with accountability and overall motivation is goal setting. Most organisations do some form of goal setting, but in practice, it can often be a pretty loose process that feels more like a burden than an inspiring set of achievements your future self will be proud of.
However, when used correctly, goals become the backbone of accountability and achievement for your team and company. There are 2 types of goals — team goals and personal goals.
Team Goals
For team level goals, OKRs are a great framework, if systemically and consistently applied. If you’re not that familiar with how these are done, by design, then there is lots of good information out there - Felipe Castro’s overview is a good start. John Doerr’s book on the subject (Measure what Matters) is one of the best resources out there.
Once the team and company understand the framework, and the team set their OKRs and with that their definition of success, but it’s down to the team to decide how to get there.
Personal Goals
To start, personal goals should feel personal. This means they should be written from a personal perspective in a way that inspires you individually.
Some people find that using an OKR-like framework for personal goals is a great format where the Objective is the inspiring personal mission/vision and the Key Results are the specific initiatives that you will be accountable against. This approach can give you an easy way to tie back the day-to-day work you are doing to a career objective you have established for yourself – thus increasing your personal connection to your work and overall motivation.
Once a given cycle starts, you need a system for accountability. Performance Management should be this system. It is essential that managers remember best performers want to be held accountable and lower performers need to be held accountable. Typically, a monthly check-in is all that is needed. The key is to make sure that the individual has plenty of time to prepare for the meetings, and are accountable for including explanations of why goals are on-track, off-track, met, not met or need to be deleted/updated. Is that your experience today? If not demand more from your manager.
We can all take the accountability to set ourselves up for success, to create our personal goals, to create team goals and to challenge for clarity on direction, vision or mission.
What is clear is that purposefully balancing employee autonomy and accountability is the key to producing a work culture that creates employee engagement with the right kind of results.
It is a balancing act that many companies are still trying to find, we all need to play our part if demonstrating the value we can achieve and making clear demands for what we need to get there faster.
“The twin sister to autonomy and freedom is responsibility and accountability. You cannot have one without the other. If someone is given an area of responsibility, not only must they be set free to do it, they must also be held accountable for what they do. Accountability clarifies freedom. In the teams and companies where you see boundary confusion, power struggles, control, over-reaching of one’s line of responsibility, you will also see lapses in accountability as well” — Henry Cloud
Until next time...
