Twitter Summary: Creative people need to feel they are in control!
Principle
Last week I wrote a post called How Money Does More Harm Than Good, my take on a principle from Dan Pink’s book Drive. The gist of that post is that financial incentives most often ruin the intrinsic value of creative work. Today I want to tell you about one of the things Pink says drives creative work: autonomy. He says there are three things that drive creative work instead of financial rewards: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Dan Pink writes that creative workers are most successful when they have autonomy over the 4 T’s: task, time, technique, and team.
Task: If people are allowed to decide what task is the highest priority for their effort, the results are amazing. For Google, Gmail came from letting employees dictate tasking along with google news and google talk.
Time: If we begin from the assumption that people want to do good work, then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than how long it takes to do it. Focusing on the task at hand, instead of the time it takes to accomplish it, will often result in a better product.
Technique: Creative people flourish when they are allowed to creatively decide how to best solve a problem. As long as there is a clear objective, there will be better results if we resist the urge to dictate the method required to solve a problem.
Team: Success blossoms when creative teams are self-initiated. Pink highlights research that showing people that work in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams and additional research shows people with high intrinsic motivation make better co-workers.
Autonomy and Making Connections
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I sold ad space for my college paper, mowed lawns to get through graduate school, and substitute taught for about 3 years to name a few. Many of my jobs have required creative team work.
Reducing peoples autonomy in a creative work environment is a sure fire way to kill a team.
I remember a specific team meeting I had at one of my many jobs, a time when I was relatively new to the team. The senior individual rounded everyone up and authoritatively laid out the work that needed to be done. Everyone fidgeted and looked at their shoes not being involved in the conversation. This was the first time anyone had heard about the project and the senior person described all the details of the problem, why it needed to be solved, and exactly how the team would solve it.
I looked around the room and wondered if everyone felt as crummy as they looked.
I was surprised there was no request for input. I was surrounded by amazing talent and experience and there was no thought put into asking for suggestions, no effort to receive input on how to answer the problem or what might be the best solution.
I’ll never forget that experience because it has solidified this principle for me – ask those responsible for doing the work how they best think a problem should be solved. That will guarantee buy-in, they will find intrinsic value in the work because they’ll have a sense or ownership, and it will take the responsibility of coming up with a solution off the shoulders of leadership.
So What?
Are you reducing the success of others by limiting their autonomy? Do you think you would see a spike in quality if those you associated with had more autonomy? Or, how are you personally ensuring you have autonomy over the things you do on a regular basis? I would love to hear how this principle connects to you!
Next Weeks Post: Second part of what drive’s people – a sense of mastering a skill.
The following comments were posted to my personal Facebook page and are so good I believe they should be shared with a larger audience…
Peter Winstead:
Very interesting. In my work our research consistently points this out as a pain point for employees. Employees want trust and autonomy from their boss, as opposed to micro-management.
I have to wonder why leaders continually miss this point, or fail to develop better skills for it. Is it their own ambitions, and always wanting their favorite people on projects, or making sure that everything is done the way they want it so they can look good? How do you train leaders to take this approach?
I’m surprised how much this same principle has applied to parenting as well. I have a hard time giving control over to my daughter for even the most minor things. When I do give her autonomy though, she responds by learning something, or feeling better about herself.
Keep the thought provoking articles coming man. Nice read.
Marc Allred:
Pete!! I love the parallel you make to parenting. I think it’s perfect.
First, I think I you start with the premise that people and kids have inherent greatness, I makes it easier to feel okay with lettin he reigns go. I feel more and more I just need to he out o my kids way so they can be awesome. Provide boundaries, but get out of their way.
Second, in parenting and leadership I think the key is delegating as many non-fatal opportunities as possible. As a parent, we want it done faster and cleaner or better. Same for supervisors. But the success comes from allowing others the chance to prove themselves with projects that won’t break the bank, but have some value. So if they do screw up, it’s not fatal.
Ben Burroughs:
For me this is really a question about power and trading the risk and reward of autonomy. Every business says they want creative employees who are self-motivated like Peter Winstead said but do they really?
It is kind of like when a company asks employees for bottom-up communication. It sounds like a good idea to have employees freely express their ideas until that gets a boss in trouble w/their superior. Then the practice becomes counterproductive.
So are companies ready to give a portion of their time to employees without knowing what they will get in return? The sad reality is that quotas are the more likely scenario–quotas that is you don’t meet you will be fired because your labor is quickly, easily, and often more cheaply replaced. Sounds overly simplistic but companies that value their employees are more likely to grant more autonomy.
Peter Winstead:
I can definitely agree with the contradictions that exist in companies like you mentioned. They do say they want the bottom-up communication: “send me an email if you have questions” or “I have an open door policy”. It’s always hard for me to tell if that the senior leader is being insincere, or if the lower level leaders are afraid of consequences when employees try to take a leader up on an offer like that. Worst case, it is the senior leader being insincere though, and they say something like what we heard recently from a senior leader in HR, that her team collaborates so well together because everyone does what she wants. Yikes.
However, we’ve seen metrics across the Fortune 500 companies and, of course, our own which suggest that in general employees don’t feel micro-managed, are satisfied with the level of decision making they have, and are satisfied with the person-job fit, all of which I think might be relevant here. I’ve personally seen many examples where employees get lots of autonomy, and become much more of a subject matter expert than their leader. I’ve recently just seen a case where a leader was trying to give more autonomy to their employees, and they didn’t want it. It’s a jungle out there, with lots of different and interesting scenarios.
It can certainly improve though. I wish leaders, especially senior leaders in companies, would work towards this more. Employees need the freedom to think for themselves, have leaders who don’t micro-manage, and allow them to take some risk in the workplace. I’ve had both types of leaders, and am much happier when they trust me. If leaders can learn how to be smart about how they assign and prioritize work, and manage it in a way so they can step back a bit without letting it go out of control, employees would be a bit happier I think.
Love this topic, and the discussion here. Let’s do this more often my friends.
I agree with what you say. My education is a good inverse example. Having grown up in a very controlling educational environment, where I was content just to obey and do well on the exams, I learned how to be lazy and dull my creative abilities, while maintaining straight A’s. There were few, but very guided, moments of creativity with little to no feedback.
However, in my graduate school the faculty is very good at providing a creative atmosphere and allowing us the freedom of the 4 T’s, but I have found it really hard to adjust and excel with this newfound freedom because of my training. I love the freedom, but I am still grappling to figure out how to use it effectively.