It takes the right balance of skills to help your employees be the best version of themselves. We hear so much about employee autonomy, but rather than thinking of it as a get-out clause that leaders can use to shun responsibility if you are looking to stimulate autonomy, you need to embody several key traits and practices that foster a supportive and ultimately empowering work environment. So what are some of the essential elements leaders need to focus on?
Deliver Trust and Delegation
When you find a worker who matches the skills and attitudes you are looking for to complete this transaction, you need to trust your employees. You need to trust that they will make the right decision and manage their responsibilities by themselves. How do you do this? You delegate, and you allow employees the freedom to choose how to achieve their goals.
Effective delegation involves assigning tasks while also providing the necessary support and resources without micromanaging, and this will show employees that you have confidence in their abilities. This is why you have to embody trust as fundamental, and if you can show employees you believe in their abilities to do something and not mess up your precious business, they will rise to the occasion, but they will also treat you with more respect.
There are many employees who feel like they’ve not been given a fair crack of the whip, which is why you could be the first person who has actually given them any sense of responsibility in their entire career.
Communicate Clearly
We all need to remember that as leaders, we set clear expectations and guidelines for projects and tasks, such as detailed briefs and outlining objectives. Employees need to understand the scope of their autonomy, and many leaders who lack the ability to communicate clearly and effectively can lose perfectly capable employees.
Business leaders can also suffer from the opinion that if an employee is not worth investing in, that leader doesn’t treat them with any sense of respect or even communicate things properly. Open dialogue is such an essential thing, as this allows employees to seek clarification and provide feedback either through one-to-one or team meetings, and this helps employees feel supported and valued.
Provide the Right Support and Resources
It’s something that many people continue to bang the drum on, but if you give your employees the necessary tools and training to succeed in their roles, you will see an incremental rise in the level of autonomy. Many times, employees can feel bound by a culture that doesn’t value speaking up or at least doesn’t look like it values it.
If you teach someone to fish, they can feed themselves for a lifetime, and therefore, if an employee does not have the right type of software, professional opportunities, or resources that support their abilities to work independently, this can be a major misfire. Additionally, as a leader, you have a lot to offer here, including guidance and advice while encouraging employees to take the initiative and develop their skills.
The right type of leader doesn’t bark orders but is a mentor or coach in terms of their mindset. This allows a greater degree of flexibility in terms of the work, but it also means successful relations between the employee and the employer. Guidance and advice are far more valuable than just telling someone what to do, which is very characteristic of antiquated notions of leadership. It’s time that we moved away from 20th-century constructs that were basically hangovers from the Industrial approach to working. We’re all people with individual needs, which is why it’s vital to facilitate these.
Offer Recognition and Feedback
We need to remember that employees are going to have failures and successes, and therefore we must recognize that success should be celebrated, but also failures need to be used effectively. Failure is something we all intrinsically avoid, and this is why we must remember that to err is to be human. It’s not that we should encourage failure, but recognize what failure actually is: the opportunity to learn something. Therefore, when we do something well, recognition is an incredibly effective approach, whether it’s verbal appreciation, public acknowledgment, or monetary value. We need to reinforce that sense of motivation and positive behavior, which we can achieve through the approaches of recognition and positive feedback.
Encourage Innovation and Creativity
Employees should be allowed to make decisions about how they complete their tasks. Ultimately, does it matter how it’s done as long as it’s done within the deadline? If we give our employees free rein in how they will complete their tasks, most of the time this will encourage problem-solving skills, create a more dynamic environment, and ultimately encourage innovation and creativity.
Nobody wants to spend one second longer on a task, and if we help our employees to learn more effective approaches to doing their work, whether it’s something like the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, or Parkinson’s Law, which dictates that the task will naturally expand to fill the time allotted, this means that employees will look for ways to work smarter instead of harder. We also need to remember that we should create a safe environment where employees feel comfortable taking risks and experimenting with new ideas without the fear of negative repercussions.
In order to be a confident leader, we should recognize that the right types of traits can feed into employee habits. We want employees to take charge because it ultimately helps us, but the concept of employee autonomy is a two-sided transaction. If we focus on these five components, we can create a work environment that leads to a productive, engaged, and motivated workforce. The concept of employee autonomy is certainly something that we hear so much about, but it’s not a byword for laziness; instead, it is a goal to strive for that feeds into the culture of an organization and creates the right type of employee that you will want to work with forever.
