Autonomy is about trust. If management expectations are that people will do the bare minimum they can get away with to get paid then the biggest problem will be building that trust in a way that doesn’t give the impression that ‘command and control’ is the reason for people working hard. Building trust is largely about transparency. Give people easy access and visibility of everything they could possibly want to know and they’ll have no reason to mistrust. This is partly what end-of-iteration demos, visible charts etc. are about. Some of it is also about trusting in the skill of the people. I’ve had many conversations where, even C-level execs, try to tell teams how they should do things. A good CTO is like a good scrum-master. They protect the teams and steer others towards prioritising ‘what’ people deliver and fiercely guard the team’s autonomy on how to deliver. In the same way that a CFO wouldn’t appreciate the CTO saying what accounting methods should be used, the CFO isn’t really in a position to tell the CTO what delivery methods should be used.
Some people may experience fear of having autonomy if they’re used to being told what to do all the time. This is another thing to consider. So, introducing autonomy can be done in small experiments with small and increasingly frequent change.
One key thing to look at is organisational values. I’d be asking: What are the actual values today (not the ones written down but the ones people actually share in)? What do we want them to be tomorrow? How do we state those values? Are they a list of expected behaviours or the values that drive those behaviours? How can we influence people to care more about the things that will make us more effective? How can we find more people who already share in our values?
Thanks for sharing the questions that crossed your mind… I hope some of my thoughts have helped anyone wondering similar things and I hope I’ve added, in some small way, to your own thoughts on the subject
Additional resources:
On company values: /blog/2010/12/your-company-values-what/
On making small changes: /blog/2010/11/my-tack-on-effective-change/
On autonomy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
I recommend the related book “Drive” by Dan Pink