Everything's Negotiable (or Is It?)

Last time I discussed how the YES! Leader needs to demonstrate flexing behaviors in order to be effective in her interpersonal interactions. I also pointed out how flexing lies at the core of many different leadership models – specifically, Situational Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and the Five Practices of Exemplary Leaders (as described in the book The Leadership Challenge). These and many other models emphasize the importance of the YES! Leader’s shifting her behaviors with different people in order to appeal to each person’s unique set of needs and internal motivators.

I was discussing this concept with two different audiences lately and was struck by an interesting question that arose in both sessions. In essence, the question was:

Rather than acting differently around different people, shouldn’t a leader be consistent in his behaviors?

Implied in the question, I think, is the sense that a leader who’s continually shifting his behavior to achieve a certain outcome is being inauthentic at best, manipulative at worst. I think it also reflects a feeling that a leader needs to be grounded in certain core values that he (and others) can always rely on and that don’t change with the weather.

As I consider this question, it occurs to me that we have another example of a (seeming) contradiction between two different points of view. And as I’ve mentioned before, rather than make an “either-or” choice, we might look for a “both-and” path instead.

To start down this path (and I emphasize the word “start”), I’ll observe that there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between holding core beliefs and values and flexing your behavior in order to reach a principled outcome with another person. A principled outcome is much like a Win-Win result, in which both parties work together to seek a mutually positive outcome rather than engage in a game of “King of the Hill” in which the most powerful party (or the best arguer) prevails over the other. To achieve a Win-Win, each party needs to let go of entrenched positions and open himself to the viewpoints, interests, and needs of the other.

Certainly, engaging in a collaborative search for a positive outcome doesn’t render a person inauthentic or manipulative. And holding to an entrenched position in the name of consistency wouldn’t be a particular virtue in such a joint endeavor.

But does this mean that everything’s negotiable? That the leader should never draw a line in the sand and say “Do not pass”? No – and this is where the leader’s core values and beliefs come into play. There is virtue in a leader’s knowing when to make a stand, when to insist on having her way, when to be influential and not influenceable. 

For example, if the other party is advocating something unethical or illegal, the leader shouldn’t just treat the other’s view as an interesting idea worthy of further development. She should just say “No.” This is where consistency has its place – to show that the leader is principled, dependable, and guided by bedrock values upon which others can rely no matter what.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

·         What are your “non-negotiables” - the core values that guide you?

·         Do you know your non-negotiables well enough so that you can instantly determine when to draw a line in the sand?

·         Do your non-negotiables extend so far that they make you rigid and unbending rather than dependable and principled?

·         Do you leave yourself enough room for flexing so you can adapt your behaviors to the needs of the moment – or do you continually fall back on legalistic rules of conduct that you uniformly apply in the name of consistency?

Gaining Power by Flexing Your Style

The YES! Leader can use the ExploreFlexSupport model – derived from the world of improvisational theater – as a guide to thriving in the modern organizational world of “permanent whitewater.”  Exploring new possibilities, flexing your attitudes and behaviors to meet each new situation, supporting others on the journey … these are essential skills for the performance improviser and the YES! Leader alike. (You can learn more about the ExploreFlexSupport model here.)

The Flex part of the model is echoed in many other models of effective leadership, communication, and interaction – for example:

Situational Leadership. The Situational Leadership model is premised on the concept that one size does not fit all when it comes to leadership.  Situational Leadership recognizes that every individual has different needs that must be met for him to do his best work. For example, some people need close instruction and monitoring, while others need a light supervisory touch and a loosening of the reins. A leader who takes the former approach in all situations will quickly (and deservedly) get a reputation as a micromanager. A leader who always takes the latter approach in all situations will gain an equally strong reputation as an “abandoning” leader. A Situational Leader continually shifts her style and applies the right mix of task behavior (such as giving direction and setting standards) and relationship behavior (such as providing encouragement and inspiration) to meet each individual’s distinct needs.

Emotional Intelligence. Two components of Emotional Intelligence are the ability to recognize how one’s behavior is impacting others and the ability to regulate one’s behavior when interacting with others in order to achieve a mutually desirable outcome.  By contrast, many emotionally unintelligent leaders adopt a “what you see is what you get” attitude that expects others to mold themselves to the leader’s personality. Rather than do the more difficult work of navigating through the needs, expectations, and emotions of others, these leaders take an inflexible, one-note approach to interactions, not knowing or caring (or both) how they’re coming across.

The Leadership Challenge. In their book The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner describe the “paradox of power” that exemplary leaders recognize: You become more powerful when you give your own power away.  It works like this: Providing others a degree of autonomy and decision-making authority gives them a chance to develop their skills and leads to more commitment to their work – which in turn creates better results for everyone, including the leader.  Leaders who deny or ignore the paradox of power tend to become nearly obsessed with gaining and maintaining control over people and situations. This in turn renders them rigid and intractable – the very opposite of a “flexing” leader.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Certainly there is a time and a place for drawing a line in the sand and holding firmly to your beliefs and opinions.  But whenever you find yourself taking an unbending stand, ask yourself: Am I truly acting from a clear sense of my values? Or am I just refusing to consider an alternative perspective because it will take too much mental “heavy lifting” to incorporate it into my worldview?

Finding the Driver of Your Motivational Engine

In my previous article, I described the way in which external incentives can “crowd out” a person’s natural, internal motivation to act. When the performance becomes all about the attainment of a carrot dangling at the end of a stick, the person can forget about the whole reason he started grasping for the carrot in the first place. If his original intrinsic drive becomes overshadowed, and if he decides a carrot just isn’t worth the effort, he may give up completely.

Last time, I cited some examples of this “crowding out” effect as described by Daniel Pink in his book Drive.  I think another good example can be found in the book Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath.

Made to Stick deals with the crafting of “sticky” messages – i.e., ones that are understood, remembered,  and likely to impact people’s opinions or behavior. The Heaths note that many people equate “persuading” with laying out a rational case for why it is in a person’s self-interest to act in a certain way.  This type of persuasion can take the form of the types of extrinsic inducements that Daniel Pink describes in Drive – do this and you’ll get that (also known in legal-Latin as a quid pro quo). 

However, as the Heaths say, “Always structuring our ideas around self-interest is like always painting with one color. It’s stifling for us and uninspiring for others.” And, as the Heaths might have added, it can also produce the opposite effect from the one intended.

To illustrate, the Heaths describe a marketer who was promoting a new educational film on fire safety that was intended to help firemen. The marketer called several local fire units to see if they were interested in purchasing the film. Their answer: An enthusiastic “Yes!”

But in an attempt to sweeten the pot, the marketer then asked a couple of respondents if they would prefer an electric popcorn popper or a set of chef’s carving knives as a thank-you for reviewing the film. Their response (as reported by the Heaths): “Do you think we’d use a fire safety program because of some #*$@%! popcorn popper?!”

As the Heaths observe, the response made no sense.  If you accept the offer, you get a popcorn popper. If you turn it down, you get nothing. Why would a purely rational decision-maker looking to maximize his self-interest take the latter course?  The Heaths go on to explain the thought process at work:

“I’m a firefighter. You’re offering me a popcorn popper to get me to view a film on safety. But firefighters aren’t the kind of people who need little gifts to motivate us to learn about safety. We risk our lives going into burning buildings to save people. Shame on you for implying that I need a popcorn popper!”

In other words, waving a shiny little gadget in front of them crowded out their previously expressed inherent motivation to consider buying the film. I think this is an excellent illustration of Daniel Pink’s observation that “mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks is a very dangerous game. When used in these situations, ‘if-then’ rewards usually do more harm than good.”

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

(As I mentioned in my earlier article, anyone can be a YES! Leader – not just people managers. So this Reflection is addressed to anyone who wants to find more meaning in work.)

Here’s a little thought experiment: What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow? If you never had to work for a living again, how would you spend a typical day? Would it be all leisure, relaxing on the beach, hobnobbing with the rich and famous?

Or would you miss putting in the effort to create something, to coordinate and lead a project, to brighten someone’s day, to make the world a better place for others?

OK, in the first few months after landing the winning ticket, you may take that extended vacation in the tropics – but assuming that you’d eventually miss doing something that resembled work, what would that something be?

As simple as this sounds, I think the answer will give you some insight into the true essence of your internal motivation. If the only thing that could possibly move you along is the “interest, creativity, or nobility” inherent in the task itself, then you’ve likely identified the driving wheel of your motivational engine.

Want Long-Term Commitment? It Takes More Than Money!

A few years ago, I was talking to the teenage son of a friend of mine about the upcoming season of his high school swimming team. Ever since he was a young boy, I had known “Chad” (as I’ll call him) to be inseparable from any body of water in his vicinity. Pool, pond, lake - you name it, he was in it. It only made sense for his parents to get him involved in organized competition at the earliest opportunity.

So when I asked him about his team’s prospects, I was shocked when he said, “I don’t think I’m going out for swimming this year.”

“You’re not? Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it just isn’t fun anymore.”

Now I suppose this is the point where a well-meaning adult could respond with something like “It isn’t all supposed to be fun. Anything worth having is worth working for.” But, as he described his situation some more, I got a sense that his real issue wasn’t so much with the work involved. It was that the whole effort had become more about winning trophies, shooting for scholarships, and pleasing adults than about the joy of swimming that had led him into the water in the first place.

I think that Chad’s experience was another good example of the downsides of relying too heavily on external incentives to motivate people.  Not only do incentives have their limitations as a means to spur performance but also – as Daniel Pink demonstrates in his book Drive - they can actually serve as a demotivator.

Pink surveys a variety of behavioral studies that demonstrate the discouraging effects of loading external inducements on top of tasks that people are inherently motivated to perform. In one study, researchers tracked a group of art students over the course of several years.  The researchers found that the students who pursued their painting primarily for the pleasure of the activity itself ultimately produced art that was socially recognized as superior to the art produced by students who were more interested in monetary rewards. In another study, a group who had expressed an interest in donating blood and then were offered a monetary payment as an added inducement were less likely to go through with their donation than a similar group who were offered nothing.  The reason, Pink notes, was that adding the monetary incentive “tainted an altruistic act and ‘crowded out’ the intrinsic desire to do something good.”

I think this sense of “crowding out” intrinsic desire can also explain what happened to Chad. As his participation in swimming became more about attaining external recognition and less about experiencing the sheer pleasure of cutting through the water, his intrinsic desire was gradually doused.

Pink cautions against drawing the conclusion that there is something inherently “evil” about extrinsic incentives.  The real point, says Pink, is that “mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks is a very dangerous game.” You may not get the results you anticipate – in fact, you may get precisely what you don’t want.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

So can you motivate your people by enriching them?  Yes – by “enriching” the job itself!  As Daniel Pink’s examples show, leveraging people’s internal motivators can result in long-term commitment to their work, as opposed to the short bursts of effort induced (or not) by external motivators. What you need to do is align the job with a person’s natural inclination to create, perform, and succeed.

In her book Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, Beverly Kaye includes an entire chapter on what she calls the “Enrich” strategy for engaging people.  As she writes, “Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process). Enrichment structures ways for employees to find the growth, challenge, and renewal they seek without leaving their current jobs or employers.”

Kaye suggests six questions to pose to people to help probe for possibilities of enrichment. What would happen if you asked your people these questions – and then found ways to take action on the answers?

·         Do you know how your job is important to the company?

·         What skills do you use on the job? What talents do you have that you don’t use?

·         What about your job do you find challenging? Rewarding?

·         In what areas would you like increased responsibility for your current tasks?

·         What would you like to be doing in the next three to five years?

·         In what ways would you like your job changed?

Loosening the Reins: It Just Makes Business Sense

The other day I happened to be browsing through one of the best-known leadership books of all time, The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. Remarkably, I landed on the following passage, which fits right in with the topic of autonomy about which I’ve been writing lately. I thought that Kouzes and Posner’s words were worth quoting in their entirety.

“If leaders want higher levels of performance and greater initiative from their constituents, they must be proactive in designing work that allows people discretion and choice. In another word, latitude. [In yet another word, autonomy - JK] To feel like they’re in control of their own work lives people need to be able to take nonroutine action, exercise independent judgment, and make decisions that affect how they do their work without having to check with someone else. It means being creative and flexible – liberated from a standard set of rules, procedures, or schedules. It means having more broadly defined jobs, offering more alternatives. Narrow job categories confine choices; broader categories permit increased flexibility and discretion. Those who hold broadly defined jobs have more options about how to accomplish the assigned objectives.

“In this dynamic global environment, only adaptive individuals and organizations will thrive. This means leaders must support more and greater individual discretion to meet the changing demands of customers, clients, suppliers, and other stakeholders. With this increased discretion comes an increased ability to use and expand one’s talents, training, and experience.”

As I read these words, I was particularly struck by Kouzes and Posner’s observation about the connection between latitude and adaptability. This shows that allowing autonomy is not simply a matter of providing more personal satisfaction for individuals; it’s also necessary for organizations to survive – and, if fully embraced, to thrive.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Certainly leaders need to be aware of how well their people are progressing toward work goals. But are your actions in monitoring your people’s work really coming across as “looking over their shoulders”?  You might find another opportunity to provide autonomy by easing up a little on the supervisory reins.

What would happen if you were to do the following?

·         Focus less on your people’s activities, focus more on their results.

·         Extend the time between “check-ins” on your people’s work.

·         Hold a brainstorming session with your people about how they can keep you in the loop without having to provide a play-by-play account of their activities.

What's the "One Best Way" to Lead? Trust Your People!

In one of my first articles, I defined the theme of this blog as: Frederick Winslow Taylor – NOT!

As I previously noted, Taylor was the consummate efficiency expert whose basic message for early 20^th Century organizations was:

Thinkers think. Planners plan. Workers work.

In other words, under Taylorism, the role of management is to define the “one best way” to perform any task through rigorous measurement, analysis, and planning, while the role of the worker is to perform the task exactly as designed – no questions asked, no suggestions accepted.

Since my earlier article, I’ve repeatedly noted how Taylor-influenced thinking stands in direct opposition to The YES! Leader’s practice in areas such as structuring work, influencing, motivating, rewarding, and collaborating. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink also notes some of the practices held over from Taylorism’s heyday that still underlie much current business thinking.

Pink notes that Taylor’s ideas might have been appropriate in an age when tasks were primarily algorithmic in nature. “An algorithmic task,” says Pink, “is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.”

Most 20^th Century work, says Pink, was algorithmic in nature – and not just manual, blue collar tasks:

“Even when we traded blue collars for white, the tasks we carried out were often routine. That is, we could reduce much of what we did – in accounting, law, computer programming, and other fields – to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a series of steps that produced a right answer.” (emphasis added)

Nowadays, however, problems (and the solutions needed to address them) are rarely so simple.  The complexity of the world poses continually unique challenges to anyone trying to define and perform a piece of work.  Because of this, says Pink, tasks are becoming more heuristic in nature - that is, no simple formula exists for carrying them out. Such tasks require the application of heuristics – general guidelines and rules of thumb – in a trial-and-error fashion in order to find a creative solution.  

If the approach to an algorithmic task resembles writing a script, then the approach to a heuristic task is more like performing improvisational theater. The performer of the task becomes thinker, planner, and worker all rolled into one. The performer must use a high level of creativity to craft the best solution for each unique situation.  And, as in improv, the performer doesn’t just create on a totally blank slate but can draw on heuristics (such as the ExploreFlexSupport model) to help inform his actions.

Pink notes that many organizations are still trying to apply Taylor-based practices to heuristic tasks, usually with ineffective or even counterproductive results.  Some examples are listed below.

Structuring work: Defining tasks (and the roles of the people who perform them) as narrowly as possible, rather than giving people a broader scope of task responsibility.

Decision-making: Reserving decisions about task performance for people in management roles, rather than allowing the people actually performing the task to make in-the-moment decisions about how they’ll achieve the objectives of the task. (Note also my earlier article on providing people autonomy in their roles.)

Providing incentives: Assuming that external motivators (primarily money and fear) are the only incentives to which people respond, rather than drawing on the inherent enjoyment of the work itself (and structuring the work accordingly) to connect with people’s internal, self-generated motivators.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

What would happen if you were to do the following?

.·      Find opportunities to define work more broadly for your people – for example, by giving them more front-to-end responsibility in their roles.

·         Manage their performance of their roles with a light touch rather than a short leash – i.e., don’t rush in to penalize them for mistakes but provide them support and create an environment where they can learn from their successes and missteps.

·         Conduct coaching conversations with your people and ask them to reflect on what makes them leap out of bed each morning, energized and ready to tackle the day’s work. (And if they can’t answer, ask them what would make them do that.) Use their answers as a guide to their internal motivators. Then do what you can to help them create those motivating elements in their work and lives.

.

Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care: A Lesson in Essential Communication

Dr. Benjamin Spock became a household name based on his book Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, published in 1946 just as the United States was embarking on one of the great demographic events in its history, the Baby Boom.

Dr. Spock’s book represented a break from traditional thinking (and writing) about baby and child care, which usually took the form of strict directives from expert practitioners about what parents must do (no wavering!) to raise good citizens. By contrast, Dr. Spock wrote in a folksy, calming style that dared to suggest that parents should trust their instincts rather than always falling in line behind the expert wisdom.  As Dr. Spock put it in one of the book’s most famous sentences: “You know more than you think you do.”

Yet in adopting this soothing approach, couched in conversational, everyday language, Dr. Spock actually was consciously downplaying one of the major influences that underlay his child-rearing philosophy. And in doing so, he exemplified one of the hallmarks of effective communication that would be cited more than sixty years later in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick.

For Dr. Spock was in fact a firm believer in Freudian psychology, which was still quite controversial in the 1940s. A large part of Dr. Spock’s intent with his baby book was to meld child-rearing advice with Freudian theory, with its emphasis on observing certain natural phases of development rather than adhering to strict timetables regarding eating, thumb-sucking, and the like.

But Dr. Spock avoided the use of technically accurate Freudian terms such as “id,” “ego,” and “Oedipal complex,” which he knew would put off the average reader of the time. Instead, as his biographer Thomas Maier writes, “Spock improvised fundamentals of Freudian theory throughout his baby book’s prose, like a leitmotiv, without identifying the composer by name…. The psychological reasons for children’s behavior were put forth like the acquired wisdom of a Yankee country doctor, not like a man who had been psychoanalytically trained.”

“I wasn’t particularly trying to hide the Freudian origins,” said Dr. Spock, “but I was aware that I would lose my audience if I tried to drag in Freud too much.”

I think Dr. Spock intuitively realized something about effective communication that the Heaths later emphasized in Made to Stick: Useful shorthand is better than useless accuracy. Dr. Spock understood his audience (typical new parents) and his purpose (to popularize a more humane approach to child-rearing) with crystal clarity. He knew that using technically correct (and highly charged) Freudian concepts in a mass-market book would undermine that purpose. Instead, by using an accessible style that appealed to his audience, and by focusing on the underlying core message of the theory rather than on the theory itself, Dr. Spock was wildly successful in achieving his purpose.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

What drives the people in the front lines of your organization? Do you think they’re motivated to jump out of bed every day, charge in to work, roll up their sleeves, and solve important problems with energy and creativity out of a burning desire to “maximize shareholder value”? 

If you don’t believe that’s the conscious driver of their actions – even though it may be a technically accurate description of what they’re there to do – then what can you do to translate the organization’s strategic goals into language (including metaphors, stories, and images) that will connect directly with their hopes, dreams, desires – and motivators for action?

For another example of someone who tilted against the same conventional child-rearing wisdom that Dr. Spock countered in his book, see also my article on Harry Harlow.

Boldly Go! Exploring Your Development Options

In my previous article, I described how job enrichment can provide a higher degree of autonomy for the YES! Leader’s team members – which in turn can help them realize a greater level of engagement, commitment, and satisfaction.

But what if you happen to be one of those team members, and what if you have the bad luck not to work for a YES! Leader? If your leader isn’t open to job enrichment ideas, are you consigned to doing the same thing day in and day out until you change jobs?

Hardly! Keep in mind one of the themes of this blog: Anyone can be a YES! Leader, regardless of position. All you need is awareness of the need for change, the application of the ExploreFlexSupport model, and a strong dose of passion.  In this situation, you need to be the YES! Leader.  If you’re not motivated to take steps to advance your career and your development, don’t expect anyone else to be motivated for you.

If you were to be performing on the improv stage, you couldn’t just stand around and wait for your scene partner to initiate an action. If your partner isn’t doing anything to advance the scene, you have to do it. Similarly, if your manager isn’t coming up and offering opportunities to advance your development, then you need to find ways to move ahead – either on your own or by enlisting allies to help.

Fittingly enough, in this situation there’s an actual option for you – what Dr. Beverly Kaye calls the exploratory option - that directly relates to the ExploreFlexSupport model. The exploratory option involves taking your own career reins and striking out into different directions that can give you what you need. 

Here are some exploratory measures that you can take on your own:

·         Enroll in a course or seminar to sharpen your skills or look into a new field of expertise;

·         Pursue a professional certification in your discipline;

·         Conduct reading and research in an area of interest to you.

Here are some examples of the exploratory option that involve marshalling allies to assist you:

·         Become active in a professional or community group – a particularly good way to get practical experience in leading and influencing others;

·         Have lunch with someone who’s doing something of interest to you, just to pick that person’s brain about what he does;

·         If you read a book or article that makes a particular impact on you, find a way to contact the author – no matter how famous – to thank her and to learn more about the topic directly from the expert source.

Autonomy and Job Enrichment

In my previous article, I described the importance of autonomy in a work environment – that is, having a degree of freedom to make choices about important matters that impact what you do and how you do it.

I suspect that many people would object to the notion of “providing autonomy” by saying that a person is hired to fulfill a certain prescribed role for an organization, one that is set out in his job description. However, there are many ways to conceive of “autonomy” aside from the immediate notion of “letting someone do his own thing.”

Autonomy is about choice – and choice is about options, variety, multiple opportunities to expand one’s horizons.  Giving a person the chance to engage in new projects and tasks will help her exercise her decision-making skills and test-drive her ability to make effective choices in her interactions with others.  And studies have repeatedly shown that on-the-job development activities such as these provide the best source of learning – even better than classroom work.

When recast in terms of giving employees more choices and options, autonomy can be directly connected to the concept of job enrichment. Dr. Beverly Kaye of Career Systems International defines job enrichment as “providing challenge, growth, and renewal in a current position.” Enrichment means changing something about the current job – shifting the balance of tasks, taking some tasks off the plate, adding new responsibilities or special projects – as a way of (in Dr. Kaye’s words) “allowing employees to take on different tasks and responsibilities or to accomplish them in new ways that promote autonomy and creativity.”

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Seeking ways to provide job enrichment for your team members is an example of an Explore behavior in the ExploreFlexSupport model. What would happen if you were to do the following?

·         Give a planning or problem-solving task to two of your team members who haven’t worked together much (if at all) and ask them to collaborate to come up with a solution.

·         Provide a team member the opportunity to take on the role of liaison to another internal customer or external partner.

·         Ask each of your team members what task they would like to do more of in their current role – and then find a way for them to actually do more of it.

·         Reflect on the one on-the-job development experience that had the biggest positive impact on your career. Then ask others in your 360-degree world (managers, peers, direct reports) to identify their most powerful development experiences. Use the list as a source of ideas for exploring enrichment opportunities for your team members.

For more job enrichment ideas, see Dr. Beverly Kaye’s article Enrich: Energize the Job.

Autonomy: Motivating Others by Loosening the Reins

I’ve written quite a bit in The YES! Leader about the factors that motivate people to be energized and engaged in their work. I just finished reading Dan Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and was struck by the insightful connections he draws among some of the same sources and concepts I’ve been surveying in The YES! Leader.

Today I’d like to deal with one particular aspect of Drive: Engaging people by creating an environment in which they can do their best work.

In Drive, Pink focuses on the role of autonomy as one of the most important factors in motivating people to achieve and excel. “Autonomy,” says Pink, “means acting with choice.” Autonomy is the discretion to decide how we’re going to do our work, or even to choose what tasks and projects we’ll pursue.

The power of autonomy is reflected in Vance Packard's commonly cited definition of leadership as "the art of getting others to want to do something you are convinced should be done.” The words want to are key here. People generally resist being pulled by the hand or pushed from behind; they prefer to lead themselves toward a goal that they’ve deliberately chosen to pursue. The former course breeds mere compliance (and thus doing just enough to get by), the latter deep commitment (and thus searching for new, creative ways to address problems and opportunities).

Pink cites a number of studies that show the motivating power of autonomy. In one study, writes Pink:

“Researchers found greater job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered ‘autonomy support.’ These bosses saw issues from the employee’s point of view, gave meaningful feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to do it, and encouraged employees to take on new projects. The resulting enhancement in job satisfaction, in turn, led to higher performance on the job.”

Encouraging new projects … seeing things through others’ eyes … providing autonomy support … in this brief description alone, Pink echoes the components of the ExploreFlexSupport model that can guide a YES! Leader to inspire others to become the best they can be.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Of course, allowing autonomy has its limits. Any leader needs to strike an appropriate balance between giving leeway and giving direction, depending on the experience of the individual and the needs of the situation.

But if you find yourself reluctant to explore ways to provide autonomy to others, ask yourself: Am I holding tightly onto the reins because of the needs of the situation – or because of my own needs?

Next time I’ll explore some practical tips for providing more autonomy to others in their work lives.