#594 How to increase your autonomy

Helen Tupper (0:00)

Hi, I'm Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast, and you are listening to one of our weekly Squiggly Career Shortcuts. These episodes are designed to be quick to listen and full of simple and effective actions to support you in your career. Today, I want to talk a little bit about autonomy and how you can earn more of it at work. Maybe before we get into the power, it's useful to talk about the why. Why do we want to bother earning more autonomy? Well, the research around this shows that the people who have the highest levels of autonomy are the people who have higher levels of well-being at work, and they are much more satisfied with the work that they do. I think, is it a topic? It's something that I probably first started to consider when I came across Dan Pink's work on Drive. He talks about drive as a different way of talking about motivation and the people that have the most motivation are people who have purpose, so the why behind the work, mastery, the skills to do the work, and autonomy, the freedom and space to do the work in the way that works for them. Today, I just want to talk a little bit about, how do we earn more autonomy if that's the payoff we get when it's present in our work?

The first thing to think about is autonomy. It is something that you earn rather than you ask for. There are certain things that we need to do to make it easier for us to get it at work. The first thing is trust. If you want more autonomy, so the ability to work in the way that you want to and work on the things that you want to, perhaps even when you want to, you have to develop trust. People have to trust that you are going to do what you say you're going to do in the way that you want to do it. Trust takes time, so you're not going to get all the freedom that you might want straight away. Now, ways in which you can increase the amount of trust that you get, and you can accelerate how quickly you get to that trust, is to be really clear with people about their expectations of the work that you're doing. Let's say this is your manager. If you can ask some really good clarifying questions up front, what does success look like for you?

What are your worries about this work? When do you need this work by? What level of involvement do you want in it? If you can ask those clarifying questions upfront, it makes it much, much easier for you to deliver on those expectations. It's that delivery that is going to make the difference to the amount of autonomy they are willing to give you with your work. Now, the other side of this is sometimes you might not be able to deliver on their expectations.

We're not all superhuman, things get in the way at work and outside of work. What is really important when that happens is that you quickly and clearly communicate when you cannot meet someone's expectations. Otherwise, all the trust that you've earned can be lost. So you might say, I'm really sorry, I know you need this report on Friday. It's not going to be possible because of X, Y, Z. So this is what I suggest I do instead. Or maybe you don't even have the answer, but at least you have the conversation. Don't leave people guessing, don't leave them worrying about the work because then you'll lose the trust that you've earned. So that's the first thing. Build trust, ask those clarifying questions upfront.

The second thing that is really important for you to earn autonomy is not making the assumption that autonomy means going it alone. And this is a mistake that I make, I'll be really honest. I love autonomy, I have a value of freedom, so it works really well for me. But my trap with this is sometimes I think, well, I'll just go do it in my own way, on my own, and then I'll come back when it's done. But often if you go away from people for too long, they can start to worry because they can't see or they're not in conversation with you. And that gap creates uncertainty for people that can reduce your autonomy.

So make sure you're saying to people really clearly, I'm going to work on this until Wednesday, and then I'll be in touch. Or I'm going to take a week or so just to get my head around this and then I'll share some first thoughts. So set people's expectations in return about when you will engage with them. Don't just think this is me doing it all on my own. Make sure that you engage people at the right points in time so that they don't feel that you've just gone rogue. If you've gone rogue, they might not value the autonomy that you want for yourself.