Does Autonomy Help Get Work Done?

 

Since our last conversation about giving the team autonomy and creating a ROWE workplace, I've been asked a couple of times something basically like this: "Giving this level of autonomy to the team is all fine and good, but it doesn't work for everyone. You have to have the right team."

I couldn't agree more.

I'll even go one step further, you can't go directly from a traditional command-and-control environment one day, and expect team members to successfully act autonomously the next. That is a recipe for disaster—there may be some team members that need to ease into it. But make no mistakes, the preponderance of evidence still suggests that it's a good idea.

What's more, as project leaders, we need to approach the team from a paradigm that assumes that they want to be accountable, want to contribute at a higher level and will do so if given the opportunity. Unfortunately, most organizations assume that employees will waste time and slack off if given the opportunity (where knowledge workers are concerned, this has proven to be a false assumption).

Over the last several months, we've talked about a couple of key areas over which project team members should have more control. In the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink, he suggests (and I whole-heartedly agree) that there are four areas of autonomy we need to consider. "...[W]hat a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with."

In an environment where our assumptions are that team members are naturally slackers, this will be a huge (if not insurmountable) leap of faith. However I'm convinced, from personal experience and observation as well as the experiences of such organizations as 3M and Google, that we can assume the best of our team members and will likely be very pleased with what a little autonomy can do.

Here's a case in point shared by Daniel Pink about fostering this level of autonomy. Google is probably the best known company to embrace this attitude in the workplace. They actually give their employees one day a week to work on personal projects. "Some Googlers use their '20 percent time' to fix an existing project," writes Pink, "but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course Google doesn't sign away the intellectual property rights to what's created during that 20 percent—which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy."

You might be surprised to know that Google products like Google News, Gmail, Orkut (Google's social networking software), Google Talk, Google Sky and Google Translate all came from this effort.

Of course, there still may be nay-sayers who suggest that what works for Google and 3M just won't work for everyone else. I have to admit, they may be right. Particularly if there's not the right management attitude behind it. However, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brooks represent another great example with how their company, Atlassian, set about creating this kind of environment as a start-up, and were incredibly successful. Without going into the details of their story (which might be good fodder for another blog post in the future), I was impressed with how they react to a finance guy who might question this approach. "I show him a long list of things we've delivered," says Cannon-Brookes. "I show him that we have zero turnover in engineering. And I show him that we have highly motivated engineers who are always trying to perfect and improve our product."

Whether or not your first impression is to create a more autonomous work environment for the members of your project team, I believe it's something that you should consider. Particularly if you work in an organization that expects your project teams to creatively solve problems and come up with new ideas.

If you're organization doesn't embrace this style of leadership, what could you do as a project leader to build this environment within your teams?