True Autonomy

Is giving someone the autonomy to operate better than actively managing them? What is a better approach for leaders to adopt?

While it is intuitive and right to advocate giving people autonomy, many struggle with this idea because they don’t understand what autonomy entails. They think autonomy means letting people operate independently and decide for themselves what they need to do-.Unfortunately, whenever they do this, the results don’t stack up, and they pull back to a default mode of micromanaging to overcompensate.

Autonomy isn’t about letting people in the team decide what needs to be done. It is about sharing what needs to be done and then giving them the freedom to decide HOW it could be done. True autonomy is all about clearly laying out the direction and then letting people focus on the execution.