This is part two of series on leadership that coincides with a course I am taking at Kendall College of Art and Design. Click here to read part one.
Autonomy and trust.
These are the two major themes that stuck out to me this week in my readings. I believe both of these ideas are tightly interlinked. Autonomy requires trust and trust requires autonomy. Liz Wiseman writes in Multipliers,
“Multipliers liberate people from the oppressive forces within corporate hierarchy. They liberate people to think, to speak, and to act with reason. They create an environment where the best ideas surface and where people do their best work. They give people permission to think.”
I am blessed to have the opportunity to work at an organization and especially with a team that trusts each other to let the ideas and attributes of individuals multiply throughout the team, and even beyond the team. As a team we encourage each other to live our culture in a way that is infectious. But we trust each other not to push our culture on other teams, or bring other teams down because they are different. We all have permission to think and speak freely because there is trust.
“Multipliers liberate people from the oppressive forces within corporate hierarchy. They liberate people to think, to speak, and to act with reason. They create an environment where the best ideas surface and where people do their best work. They give people permission to think.”
- Liz Wiseman
- Multipliers
Simon Sinek writes about trust in his book Start with Why.
“The only way people will know what you believe is by the things you say and do, and if you’re not consistent in the things you say and do, no one will know what you believe.”
Throughout his book he continually ingrains his concept of the golden circle on the reader. If we start with why, and hold strongly to our why, our whats and our hows will consistently communicate our why. It is this consistency that builds trust in a team or trust in a brand or trust in a company. If our whats and our hows don’t match our whys consistently, people wont’ know who we are. They won’t know how they can identify with us. They won’t trust us.
With trust, we are free to act autonomously in our organizations and our families. There is no need for management. Daniel Pink in his book Drive suggests that perhaps it’s time to just toss out the whole idea of management. Trust allows for autonomy, and with autonomy people don’t need to be managed. One of my first experiences with autonomous work was when my team at work decided to put up a bounty board. This was a board that contained a bunch of ideas for small projects we wanted to do as a team but never had the time to do. If someone had some down time, they were free to pick a task off this board and solve the problem however they wanted. I decided to tackle a few problems from that board. We were looking for a way to make our local development process more consistent with each other on the team. Before we all used our own tools and setups to develop code. This led to a lot of unforeseen bugs in our software. The all to familiar saying in the software industry “It works on my machine,” was said all to often. So I decided to develop a solution using a new technology called Vagrant. This technology allowed us to install a consistent tech stack on our individual computers that was exactly the same for everyone. So if someone’s code worked on their machine, it should theoretically work on my machine. I developed that solution over two years ago now, and we’re still using it today.
“Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”
- Peter Gibbons
- Office Space
Trust and autonomy are absolutely essential for groups of people to prosper, to grow and to innovate. Without it we are just algorithmic task masters doing meaningless work. As Peter Gibbons would say, “Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”