This topic is a fun one because a lot of people think Autonomy and Agency are the same thing! Spoiler alert, they aren’t!
Autonomy means that your leaders give you the freedom and space to execute on what they think is best way for things to work to meet their strategic goals. Agency means your leaders trust you with making the call on what is necessary to deliver on the overall goal, without having a strong opinion on the how.
As you can guess Automony tends to lead to a much slower organization. The leaders that lead the teams, don’t actually get to make the call on how to proceed, what to work on and how execute properly. They are being handed decisions and direction on everything and given the space to execute on it. Those decisions and direction are coming from people that have a ton on their plates, whether it’s customers, other departments or a lot of reports…they are slower to make decisions and move things forward, simply due to their lack of bandwidth.
Teams that are build and given agency, are typically faster, more able to pivot and change direction if needed. They are also fast, they move quickly because they are more bought into the execution because they own it, from start to finish. They are building a plan to reach the high level executive goals and then owning and executing on a daily basis. Which allows for faster decision making, high levels of clarity and ownership and finally…faster delivery.
It’s not easy to let go of the reigns for some executives, but the long term benefits to doing so can be massively beneficial to the business.
I hope this is helpful, thanks for being here! Reach out for questions or comments!
