Want to increase performance, creativity, innovation & wellbeing at work? Autonomy might be the answer.
In a previous post, we explored the evidence that allowing individuals to have too much or too little power predicts many adverse outcomes at work. Powerful individuals become more detached, less caring, overconfident, and prone to bad behaviour. At the same time, leaving individuals powerless creates demotivation and low self-esteem and impacts wellbeing. Without some autonomy, we fundamentally suppress the talent and creativity of our employees.
The 2023 Future of Jobs Report¹ issued by the World Economic Forum showed that creative thinking was the second most crucial core skill for employees identified by the respondent organisations. Over 73% (net) considered this skill to be of rising importance (the highest score of any skill in the dataset). Interestingly, the same organisations estimated that, on average, less than 7% of employees demonstrated creative thinking skills. This glaring disparity has far less to do with innate talent and more with limited autonomy.
We have strong evidence that autonomy increases motivation, reduces stress, improves well-being, makes jobs more interesting, and fosters creativity. Yet, we slavishly maintain the status quo. If we never allow people to apply creative thinking to their work, why are we surprised to see so little evidence of creativity in our organisations? It’s the system, not the individuals.
Could a focus on creating more autonomy throughout the organisation help with all these issues? If you remember our discussion on wellbeing, researchers found that the typical wellbeing interventions deployed by most organisations had no effect. The only intervention shown to have an impact was training managers to support their employees’ autonomy more. This led to employees reporting greater job satisfaction, improved wellbeing and more positive and trusting attitudes toward top management. In addition to conferring many other benefits, increased autonomy positively changed employees’ perceptions of the organisation.
In his book The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Time², CEO Dennis Bakke tells a fable based on his experiments to genuinely devolve decision-making throughout AES, a global power company with 27,000 employees. Dennis maintains that the ability to make decisions is central to the fundamental nature of being human.
We have evolved to have the innate ability to think, reason, make decisions and hold ourselves accountable. We constantly make decisions in our personal lives, but at work, most of us are expected to follow instructions blindly rather than use our highly developed decision-making skills. Dennis says:
“Creating an environment that pushes decision-making down to the people closest to the action is best for the organisation, and it’s even more important for the individuals that make up that organisation.”
He describes an elegant decision-making process in which an employee knowledgeable about the topic takes ownership of a decision. To arrive at the decision, they must seek advice and counsel from their peers and senior leaders – but the decision is theirs to make, having done so. Interestingly, Netflix’s current thinking³ on decision-making is remarkably similar:
“We avoid decision-making by committee, which tends to slow companies down and undermine accountability. For every significant decision, we identify an informed captain who’s responsible for making a judgment call on the right way ahead.”
This opportunity to have autonomy, make progress and feel a sense of purpose mirrors the findings of Dan Pink’s research published in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Really Motivates Us. Dan’s review of The Decision Maker concludes: “Dennis Bakke brings these principles to life in a modern business fable with ample lessons for building successful organisations from the ground up.”
But could increasing autonomy throughout the organisation also mitigate the undesirable side effects of too much power residing in a small number of individuals? By creating ways to devolve power, we might get a double bang for our buck. It’s an intriguing possibility. I’m much more drawn to testing this approach than the suggested mitigations against the corruption of power outlined in the Harvard Business Review⁴. In their article, the authors suggest that “seeking opportunities to show compassion” and “doing a daily compassion meditation” might save leaders from succumbing to the corrupting effects of power. I suspect that’s pretty unlikely. We can and should do much more.
Taking the concepts of autonomy even further, we enter the world of self-managing teams and flattened hierarchies, as described by the author Frédéric Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations. One of the organisations featured in the book, Buurtzorg, has become a poster child for high autonomy and low hierarchy organisation design.
It was founded in the Netherlands in 2006 by Jos de Blok and a small team of professional nurses who realised that years of organisational nonsense and narrow, rational, efficiency-driven changes had undermined their relationships with patients. They set out to simplify the healthcare system and demonstrate a genuinely patient-centred way of working.
Along the way, they created high autonomy for the nursing teams and their clients, who they recognised wanted to control their lives and live independently for as long as possible. They describe their philosophy for self-managing clients:
“The professional attunes to the client and their context, taking into account the living environment, the people around the client, a partner or relative at home, and on into the client’s informal network; their friends, family, neighbours and clubs as well as professionals already known to the client in their formal network. In this way the professional seeks to build a solution involving the client and their formal and informal networks. Self-management, continuity, building trusting relationships, and building networks in the neighbourhood are all important and logical principles for the teams.”
The results have been spectacular. Following the ‘Humanity Over Bureaucracy’ principle, Buurtzorg has grown to over 950 self-managed nursing teams, employing over 15,000 nurses. The business has been voted Employer of the Year in the Netherlands four out of the last five years. Employee satisfaction is at 87%⁵.
Productivity is so high that an independent assessment by EY showed that this approach generated savings of over 40% for the Dutch healthcare system. In 2016, Buurtzorg used its strategy to transform two competing Dutch care companies. Both are now enjoying similar gains in productivity and staff and client satisfaction.
In 2009, the executive team at Netflix wrote an internal slide deck entitled “Freedom & Responsibility Culture.” Subsequently, it went viral, with over 5 million online views. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called it “One of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley”. Autonomy was a central theme throughout the document, which included statements such as:
Responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of freedom.
Our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow rather than limit it.
We try to get rid of rules where we can to reinforce the point*.
Netflix’s policy for expenses, entertainment, gifts & travel: Act in Netflix’s best interests (5 words).
Formalised development is rarely effective, and we don’t try to do it. Individuals should manage their own career paths.
Netflix continues to adapt and refine these practices today, advocating for People over Process⁶:
“Many of us have worked at companies where decisions were made top down, there was little transparency, and it felt hard to make a difference — or even get basic things done. At Netflix, we aim to inspire and empower more than just manage because people can have a greater impact when they’re free to make decisions about their own work.”
Meanwhile, despite growing evidence that alternative organisational constructs can deliver exceptional results, 99.99% of large organisations carry on unquestioningly with the old models and all the nonsense they entail. I’m not suggesting that all large organisations immediately move to dissolve their hierarchies – that would probably cause untold chaos. However, there are easy, practical, and low-cost ways to test whether changing power distribution is beneficial. The first is increasing autonomy from the bottom up. This has two components:
Training frontline and middle managers to support greater autonomy for the teams they lead⁷.
Providing those teams with the time and design tools to give them more control over their work and how the team’s objectives are reached.
For example, in his book Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World⁸, Brian Robertson, CEO of a US software company, outlines a system his company uses to create highly autonomous teams. This system includes replacing rigid job titles and descriptions with ‘roles’ defined collectively at the team level. This means employees may take on multiple roles, each with specific decision-making rights and authority. Furthermore, roles can be traded between team members, so long as somebody does all the roles required for the team to meet its objectives. This allows team members to have far more control over their work, to learn and test out new roles, and to swap roles with other team members based on collective responsibility and collaboration.
The second is devolving power from the top down. This potentially has three components:
Educating executives and senior leaders on the effects of power and status on them as individuals, finding ways to support greater empathy and critical examination of their belief systems. This could include coaching using the concept of ‘Deep Canvassing’**, a fascinating conversational technique that has emerged from US voter canvassing.
Testing ways to increase co-determination, such as executive committee and board worker representatives.
Genuinely delegating decisions to those closer to the action, perhaps using the process outlined by Dennis Bakke or an alternative design concept.
Whatever way you look at it, increasing autonomy is a promising hypothesis to test.
*Netflix famously scrapped the vacation policy and tracking. Patty McCord, the company’s Chief Talent Officer, remarked, “There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one has come to work naked lately.”
**The New Conversation Initiative, an organisation that supports deep canvassing campaigns describes the technique: “Deep canvassing is about working to create mutual understanding grounded in lived experience, instead of in debate or talking points. When we take this approach, people’s experience leads them away from prejudice, stigma, or fear, and towards empathy and a willingness to consider progressive solutions.”
1. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf
2. The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Time, Dennis Bakke, Pear Press,March 2003
3. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
4. Power Can Corrupt Leaders. Compassion Can Save Them, Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, and Louise Chester, Harvard Business Review, February 15th 2018
5. Source: Buurtzorg.com August 2024
6. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
7. See www.disrupt.co for resources
8. See https://www.holacracy.org/ for details