Increasingly, autonomy is increasingly more important for employees than money.
And yet I come across many CEOs who:
a) Are scared to delegate important tasks for fear that they won’t be done as well as they could do it themselves
b) Are obsessed with tasks being performed in a certain way.
c) Believe they can’t compete with “the big boys” because they can’t pay as much.
It’s important for us to realize that achieving the desired result from any activity as quickly as is sensible is usually what really matters – not exactly how it is achieved (as long as ethical and legal boundaries are respected).
In many cases, employees want and need the freedom to get there in the way that makes most sense for them. Why make them follow a prescribed and perhaps impractical methodology, just because that’s the way it’s always been done?
Of course, giving employees the autonomy they're looking for means accepting the likelihood of failures and mistakes – maybe even a lot of them. But it’s an absolutely short-term pain that's necessary in order to build the skills your business needs to succeed over the long term.
This is especially so as a CEO if you’re serious about freeing yourself from daily operations.
After all, you want autonomy too, right?
Want to talk about how to apply autonomous working in your organization? Send me an email at hm@hamishmackenzie now, or book a free 30-minute consultation.
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Copyright Hamish Mackenzie, 2020
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