A friend who took a job in the United States a few years ago is intrigued by the cultural differences she finds in the workplace, recently remarking on how commonplace the term “individual contributor” is and the powerful spell it casts in that land of individualism. Her instinct is to respond “there are no individual contributors, we’re all collaborators” but she is too politely Canadian to say that.
Individualism matters here as well, however. Autonomy is increasingly being recognized as vital to motivation and engagement. People don’t want to feel like robots or cogs in a wheel. They want to act on their own ideas and make their own decisions. Yet clearly, most of us work in a collaborative environment, getting things done together. Managers need to balance autonomy and collaboration – offering both.
I was taken when I studied Vancouver-based Creo Products in 2002 by its philosophy that everyone was the most knowledgeable person about their job and therefore should be considered the unit president of their work. Unless they were specifically told they didn’t have authority to act or to decide something, they were to assume they had the power.
Creo considered such autonomy its secret weapon – it was a tech darling until bought by Kodak – and the company went so far as to have no oversight of expenses. Everyone had a corporate credit card and was expected to use it wisely, after being taught basic economic decision-making. The mistakes that might occur with such freedom were considered less costly by top officials than policing spending.
But people are not isolated islands and the unit presidents were taught they had a responsibility to determine who was affected by a decision and to build an agreement on the proper path with those colleagues. “If you don’t involve the appropriate group of stakeholders, your decision may not be effective because you won’t have buy-in from the right people,” the written Creo philosophy warned.
So collaboration was built from a foundation of autonomy rather than autonomy merely permitted. As decisions involved more and more people, managers and team leaders became involved. But instead of managers being worried about getting buy-in from everyone, as is the common situation in organizations today, the unit presidents were advised it was their responsibility, an outgrowth of their autonomy.
That won’t work everywhere. The company had fewer than 2,000 people, relatively small. And size plays a role. After years of watching organizations, Charles Handy concluded 45 people should be the maximum size of a work group. When a manager tells him the organization has grown to 100 people, he responds, “Be careful. You will now start to introduce specializations and departments; you will become more bureaucratic, a machine.” Machines are generally not conducive to autonomy.
He stresses that we need large organizations more than ever, as the world increasingly becomes one big marketplace. But they need to divide themselves into small villages, of no more than 45 people. In a sense, he is arguing there is a scale to proper collaboration and autonomy, as opposed to top-down bureaucracy.
People praise collaboration but detest meetings and e-mail, the places where most collaboration takes place. A common complaint is that we spend all our lives in meetings and then come back to our desk in the late afternoon to do our real work. The implication is that real work is alone, autonomous – the individual with their spreadsheet or their (collaborative) e-mail load.
The implication is that autonomy or individual productivity is thwarted by collaboration, or at least collaboration in meetings. But Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg provided a counter-perspective in his study of investment analysts, free agent knowledge workers who might be considered the ultimate individual contributors. When the top analysts moved to new firms, he found they experienced an immediate degradation in performance. “Even after five years at a new firm, star analysts who changed employers underperformed comparable star analysts who stayed put,” he wrote in Chasing Stars.
But when teams of analysts went to another firm in a lift-out, they fared well. They took with them their ability to work together and the culture they had developed. Arguably, as a unit, they had a form of group autonomy in the new organization, if you will. But the key point is that the autonomous individual star dwindled in effectiveness after the move.
These cautions and contradictions are important. They remind us it’s not an issue of autonomy versus collaboration, but how to get both. Autonomy, to be effective, should be directed to the organizational interests. It should be in line with the organization’s strategy and purpose. Everybody seeking their own idiosyncratic idea of what’s best can be disastrous.
So for autonomy to work, leaders must not only be willing to grant it but also willing to work endlessly to make sure the strategy is understood and accepted. Decision points are critical – figuring out, as Creo did, the level at which different decisions will be made. Leaders must restrain themselves from feeling every decision they know about is best made by them.
But collaboration must also be nurtured and celebrated. Performance evaluations currently are focused on the individual and that has to be rethought in a collaborative era. Bonuses and incentives as well. People who don’t play well with others need to be weeded out. At the same time, there needs to be some recognition of the dangers of collaboration overload – of some people, maybe many people, spending all their time working with others in a way that results in productivity being reduced rather than enhanced.
Look around you this week. Ponder what you see in terms of autonomy and collaboration, when it’s healthy and when it’s not, and how they might fit together better in your organization.
Cannonballs
- In setting out job requirements, the consultants at Nobl Academy suggest distinguishing between “fail-safe” and “safe-to-fail” elements. The “fail-safe” criteria are essential skills that can’t be delegated or outsourced; they require mastery up front but should be kept to a minimum to increase your odds of finding a candidate. The “safe-to-fail” elements are where you have more flexibility if the candidate lacks them.
- Whether it comes to employees told about a new change initiative or consumers considering a new product, 95 per cent will lurk, according to entrepreneur Seth Godin. That’s fine; lurkers are potential action-takers. Focus on the five per cent and their actions may bring lurkers along.
- Increasingly, American companies are following the famed Rooney Rule of the National Football League, requiring one candidate on their interview slate whose hiring would increase gender and racial diversity. But the impact has been minimal for top positions. Instead, hiring managers should aim to interview a slate of candidates that’s 30 per cent diverse, advises Alina Polonskaia, global leader of the diversity and inclusion practice at executive recruiter Korn Ferry.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
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Harvey Schachter