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Lack of Autonomy: The Plague of the Modern Workplace

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Pawel Brodzinski

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Radical Self-Organization is a way I tend to label organizational design that we adopted at Lunar Logic. It’s been dubbed The Lunar Way too on occasions. Anyway, it draws from different approaches to design organizational structure in a very flat, non-hierarchical way. Describing what we do is probably worth a separate post on its own, yet this time I want to focus on one underlying principle: autonomy.

Our evolution toward Radical Self-Organization was experimental and emergent. Initially we didn’t set a goal of distributing authority, autonomy, and all the decision-making power across the whole organization. It emerged as a sensible and possible outcome of further evolution on the path we set ourselves onto. This means we were figuring out things on our way and quite often explored dead-ends.

The good part of such approach is that, we wanted it or not, we needed to understand underlying principles and values and couldn’t just apply a specific approach and count on being lucky with the adoption. No wonder that on our way we had quite a bunch of realizations what was necessary to make our effort successful.

One of the biggest of such realizations up to date for me was the one about autonomy.

A traditional, hierarchical organizational structure that distributes power in a top-down manner is ultimately a mechanism depriving people of autonomy.

Let me explain. Top-down hierarchy addresses challenges of indecisiveness and accountability. We ideally always know who should make which decision and thus who should be held accountable for making it (or not making it for that matter). So far so good.

The problem is, that the same mechanism discourages managers throughout a hierarchy to distribute the decision-making power to lower levels of organization. After all, if I am held accountable for a decision, I prefer to make the final call myself. Even if I end up being wrong it’s my own fault and I don’t suffer for mistakes of others, i.e. my team.

In short, as a manger in a traditional structure I’m incentivized to double-guess and change the decisions proposed by my team even if I go as far as consulting my calls with the team. In other words, I am discouraged to distribute autonomy.

This has fundamental consequences. Autonomy is a key prerequisite of being motivated at work. Lack of motivation and disengagement is a plague at modern workplace. In 2013 Gallup reported that worldwide only 13% of employees were engaged. We can’t expect our team to be creative, highly productive and responsive to ever-changing business environment when they simply don’t give a damn.

And it’s not teams’ fault. We create systems where autonomy, and as a result engagement, simply is not designed in.

It’s not managers’ fault either. We set them up in a structure where they are punished for distributing autonomy.

The biggest problem is that hierarchical structure is a prevailing management paradigm, which we are taught from the earliest contact with the education system. The very paradigm is the plague of the modern workplace.

There is one important side note to mention here. Autonomy doesn’t equal authority. The two works well as a pair but neither is a prerequisite to have the other.

I can give people authority to make project related decisions, e.g. that we terminate collaboration with a client. They can formally do it. However, if I instill enough fear of making such a tough call so that everyone is too afraid to do so people won’t have autonomy to make such a decision.

On the other end, we may not distribute authority formally, but we may live up to the standards of “what’s not forbidden is allowed” and may believe that “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”. In such an environment people will be making autonomous calls even if they don’t always have authority over the matter.

Coming back to the argument about disengagement, it’s about lack of autonomy, not lack of authority. In other words, simply giving people power to make some decisions won’t solve the issue. It’s about real autonomy, which unfortunately is so much harder to achieve.

If we agree that lack of autonomy is the problem we have quite an issue here. Since the root cause of the problem goes as deep as to the way we design organizations. Changing how we think about the domain is a huge challenge.

The other day I was reading an article that mention a guy who opened a branch office in another city and let it run as a Teal organization with no managers and huge autonomy. His summary of his own story was something along the lines: there are 30 people with no management and they are doing great, but I think by the moment there are 50 of them we’ll hire a director.

This shows how strongly we are programmed to think according to old paradigm. It’s like saying “it’s going great, let’s kill it because, um, my imagination doesn’t go as far to imagine the same thing in a slightly bigger scale.”

It also shows how big of a challenge we are about to face. Simply changing how the power is distributed in an organization won’t do the trick. Unless such a change is followed with the actual change in power dynamics, enabling autonomy in lower levels of an organization it would simply mean paying a lip service. The most difficult change that needs to happen to allow for such a transformation is the one happening in the mindset of those in power, i.e. managers.

That’s bad news. If we consider power as privilege, and I do perceive it so, it means that many managers would be oblivious to the notion that they are somehow privileged over others. It means that we first need to work on understanding of domain. Once there, there’s another challenge to face: giving up the privilege. It can’t just be done by setting up different roles. That would be simply distributing authority and that is not enough.

The real game changer is distributing autonomy: the courage to make decisions even when—especially when—a decision would go against manager’s judgement. After all, the plague of the modern workplace is not lack of authority, but lack of autonomy. Without addressing it we should neither expect high motivation levels nor high engagement.

Comments

4 responses to “Lack of Autonomy: The Plague of the Modern Workplace”

  1. Weronika Ł. Avatar
    Weronika Ł.

    Based on my experience, the need for hiring a manager in a bigger team is not only a question of deep programming, but it’s also pragmatism. Autonomy requires providing a lot of context to make decisions, so the more people you add, the more you need to know… At some point, it stops scaling and you need some change.
    Even though the idea of “no managers” always seemed appealing to me, in bigger organizations it may not be a good solution, at least not for all kinds of decisions, because the communication overhead becomes too big. So even if you still stick to the concept, some things need to change, so people can actually do their work instead of spending most of their time “managing” :)

  2. Pawel Brodzinski Avatar
    Pawel Brodzinski

    @Weronika: You raise an important concern. That of alignment. How do we make people row in the same direction?

    The common answer is: the managers. We add managers and throughout the hierarchy we distribute the goals down so that everyone at each level of an organization is (ideally) chasing the same purpose.

    The thing is that it is not THE answer to the challenge of alignment. It is merely an answer. The most popular one, I give you that, but most definitely not the only one.

    In the example you bring you mention that you need context to make decisions. I agree. What context do we talk about exactly? Probably understanding higher level goals of an organization. Likely the experience in making similar decisions. Almost for sure understanding of consequences: first-level consequences (direct outcomes), but also second- and third-level ones (indirect outcomes).

    With no one having enough context the outcome of decision is likely unwanted. However, choosing between a manager having that context and everyone having the context is a false dichotomy. Most of the time it’s enough to have someone understanding the context.

    What’s more, decision-making in autonomy-driven workplace is not mandatory. It is based on a principle of action. Whoever is willing to act is free to do so. Their accountability, however, is to get that broader context before they make the call.

    In a way it is a self-balancing mechanism. If you’re willing to make a decision not only do you gain power to make it but also take responsibility for making it well. It is easier when you already have the expertise since then the transaction cost–the cost of getting the context–is lower. However, in autonomy-based system no one is discouraged or forbidden to run an extra mile and get into a position of making a decision.

    In reality, in autonomy-based organizations “management” tasks don’t dominate anyone’s job. People step in and out of these tasks as they see fit. And most of the time when they step in is when they are the best people to do so, i.e. better than a manager would be if there was such a position.

    So the real challenge to scaling is scaling the purpose and alignment of this purpose. That’s a nuanced discussion. Some examples that come to my mind are from organizations that clearly define individual goals of any team/group in alignment with the company goal (Spotify, Zalando). Then such a team works purely to optimize experience with one part of the product. W.L. Gore is built around several fairly independent but cooperating divisions (each limited to few hundred people at most). Buurtzorg, to bring up a Teal poster child, is divided to small independent teams geographically but operating against the same values and striving for the same standards.

    In each of these cases the structure of management, even if it exists, is not crucial link to get the alignment across the company.

  3. Tomek Avatar
    Tomek

    Very nice read, thank you. I also imagine that there are situations where we’re actually given autonomy (and authority) but we limit ourselves because of our past experiences (i.e. from previous company). Thus we teach our teammates and the whole organisation that we’re unable to use given autonomy, starting endless spiral ;-)
    And btw. is it possible to create such environment (with autonomy, authority) while not being a manager? Like bottom-up?

  4. Pawel Brodzinski Avatar
    Pawel Brodzinski

    @Tomek – I don’t think building such an environment in a bottom-up manner without support from management is a viable strategy.

    In a traditional hierarchical environment power is given by higher ranks and it can’t be acquired unless there’s a consent of a higher rank. This means that if someone acted autonomously without support of their manager they would quickly be stopped. If they persisted they’d likely end up being fired.

    Revolutions don’t fare well in organizational context.

    It doesn’t mean that such a person would be out of options, though. The way to go is through influence of those who hold power, i.e. management. Oftentimes there are low hanging fruits that can be harvested to satisfaction of both parties.

    One such example that frequently pops up is accepting time off. In many organizations vacation days have to be accepted by a manager to be valid. It creates an illusion of control (after all how many times a manager can reject a time off request before an employee becomes disgruntled and leaves?) but more importantly it perpetuates the situation where it is a manager’s responsibility to make sure things are taken care of when an employee leaves for vacations. We can turn the table and remove the acceptance process. At the same time we give both autonomy to each employee to decide when they take time off along with accountability for planning how their duties will be taken care off when they aren’t around. Through this we’d distribute just a little bit autonomy and remove one dull duty for a manager.

    If the example sounds irrelevant because that’s how a disputed organization handles time off already then there’s another step on the way of broadening autonomy. And then another.

    In my experience as a manager going through evolution from making almost all the decisions myself to making almost none of them was an extremely liberating process. This is one of the things that kept me going on down the path of radical autonomy.

    If one can get their manager to experience some of that by proposing small changes it may be used later on to extend the sphere of autonomy further.

    At the same time the whole strategy is based on good will of management and as such is not guaranteed to work. We are taught to operate in a bureaucracy for years and it’s far from comforting to give up power that we have as managers.

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