the lack of autonomy at work it is a ballast that prevents organizations and people from developing to their full potential.
What is autonomy at work?
We call autonomy at work when collaborators feel that they have control over their tasks, that they are the authors of what they do. Bad bosses curb people’s initiative, ingenuity, and productivity, and bureaucratize organizations.
In surveys with companies that receive help from Tecmilenio’s Institute of Integral Well-being Sciences (ICBI), we measure autonomy and have discovered that it is one of the variables that employees value the most.
In the most recent exercise, among 25,000 employees of organizations recognized as happy, 92% said they felt satisfied because they had autonomy to carry out their tasks and make decisions, and 90% were pleased that they are allowed to participate in the preparation of plans and run them.
leader insecurity
Organizations that lack well-being are led by insecure and distrustful leaders who do not let their teams make their own decisions.
They do not listen to opinions, they publicly mock the contributions and the most toxic ones steal ideas and assign the projects to a third party. Thus, nobody will want to contribute, even if they know the solution to a problem.
In his distrust, the leader must review and authorize all work.
Many organizations pay salaries for talent that they do not take advantage of because these types of bosses are dedicated –perhaps unintentionally– to destroying the best of a company: its people.
Happiness and autonomy
For Richard Ryan and Edward L. Deci, researchers at the University of Rochester, people have three basic needs on which their happinessand the first is autonomyfeeling free to make decisions and of express emotions and thoughts (the other two are competition and positive relationships).
Raj Raghunathan, a professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, says that five factors are necessary to determine whether an organization is well-being: basic needs, autonomy, growth potential, belonging, and an enriching organizational culture.
Marisa Salanova, founding member of the Spanish Society of Positive Psychology, highlights that positive leaders “facilitate self-determination and self-leadership.”
An organization that facilitates the autonomy of its people produces well-being, a state that boosts the productivity and profitability of companies.
What can we do
The main objective is to change leadership towards one that facilitates autonomy.
It is removing the fear that everything will go wrong if we are not present, and if it does go wrong (because it will), offer our support to those who failed to learn together from the mistake and not repeat it again.
It will be a slow process because trust is hard to earn and requires a lot of consistency between what we say and do.
It is also necessary to redefine: tasks with the collaborators themselves, relationships between people, areas and hierarchies, and the meaning that each one gives to their position.
The latter is very relevant. Any position in an organization is important, if not, it has no reason to exist.
Job redesign involves appreciating each task and giving it a meaning that makes sense to the person and the organization. Only then will we have collaborators willing to risk their talent giving opinions, making decisions, proposing solutions, looking for new opportunities, developing their own potential and that of the organization.