Creating Autonomy in Routine Jobs

One of my core management philosophies is that managers should define the ultimate outcomes with their people, but not the specific steps to reach those outcomes. Each employee ought to have the freedom to figure out their own path to the goal.

This solves the “manager’s dilemma” of how to serve the organization while also providing autonomy to the employee’s. The organization is served because employee efforts are directed toward the performance of the organization; at the same time, employees have autonomy because they are able to determine the best way to accomplish those results, based on their own individual preferences, judgment, and talents.

It also serves employees to know the outcomes because it is motivating to know what is expected of you and how it serves the larger picture.

One question I often get about this is: How does this work for jobs that are largely routine? For example, how would this work for a factory worker?

There’s a lot that can be said here, but Tom Morris does a good job of articulating a core part of the answer in If Aristotle Ran General Motors:

A concern for truth should continually play an important role in how we think about our jobs and in the many ways we interact with others in our work. But a concern for beauty should guide us too.

How, you might wonder, can a factory worker be an artist and experience this form of active beauty if he has to perform the same routine motions over and over, all day long? This is part of the reason Jack Stack decided to teach everyone at the Springfield Remanufacturing Company what he began to call “The Great Game of Business.”

Even the factory-floor worker engaged in repetitive acts of assembly can play the game of business, using his mind to devise more efficient processes and motions, connecting his specific job with the big picture of what’s going on in the overall company life.

He may be able to see things no one else can see and make suggestions for beautiful improvements no one else could make. He alone may be in a position to create an elegant solution to a problem that no one else can solve, or even notice.

We need to encourage the people who work around us to think of their jobs in this way, no matter what their jobs might be. Everyone can be a performance artist and an important player in the great game of business.

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January 21, 2010 | Filed Under Management | 2 Comments 

Comments

2 Responses to “Creating Autonomy in Routine Jobs”

  1. Jeff Owens on January 22nd, 2010 1:28 am

    I totally agree with your philosophy of management. The problem I have run into is that I live in a culture where people are trained since birth to do as they are told and not to think for themselves.

    Do you (or anyone else who is reading) have any suggestions for how to train employees on how to go from a mindset of “tell me each step of the process” to “just tell me what the end result should look like”?

  2. Matt on January 22nd, 2010 5:08 pm

    That’s a great thing to bring up. I am not aware of much written on that, actually, perhaps because so much is written from the perspective of American culture where so many people by default expect and seek autonomy. (Although even here, many do have the mindset of “just tell me each step.”)

    I think that some of Stephen Covey’s stuff might be helpful here. In the Seven Habits, for example, he talks about being “proactive” and what that means, which is a fundamental ingredient here. Then, later on in that book, he talks about “win-win performance agreements.” I think that, initially, that’s where I’d start.

    These performance agreements make the expectations and guidelines clear, which is important in all cases, and especially in the context where most are used to just having someone tell them each step. The key is to train them that when they want to look for someone to tell them the next step, they should instead look again at the desired results and guidelines, and then identify their own course within that framework. The components include these four things (plus a few others that aren’t coming to mind right now):

    1. Desired results
    2. Guidelines
    3. Resources
    4. Accountability

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