Offer Autonomy Without Fear

The autonomy that you craved as an individual contributor can become the very thing you deprive from your team members when you become their manager.

You wanted autonomy because you believed you were skilled enough to make good choices. And now you have the authority to impose those choices on others.

But the desire to impose those choices on your team often stems from fear and from an identity that’s still anchored in your old individual contributor role. Overcoming those fears depends on shifting your identity from one whose value comes from doing the work to one whose value comes from developing others.

You may fear the loss of control over what your team produces. Treat that fear as a signal to develop clarity in your communication regarding expected outputs and the constraints that govern your product.

You may fear a loss of quality in what your team produces. Treat that fear as a signal to invest in the skills of coaching to co-create a plan together with them. In that plan, include clarity around a rhythm of lightweight checkins where you can coach your team members by way of clarifying questions.

You may fear a loss of velocity in the pace of your team’s delivery. Treat that fear as a signal to consider the long-term impediment you will become when you remain too much of a bottleneck or gatekeeper.

You may fear a loss of accuracy through your team’s mistakes. Treat that fear as a signal to strengthen the resilience of both your manual and automated processes to let the team protect itself from fragility.

You may fear a loss of your reputation when your team does things differently than you would. Treat that fear as a signal to deliberately demonstrate trust in your team, and highlight the autonomy they have to make decisions and hold responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

For engineering managers, granting autonomy by delegating decisions can sometimes be more of a challenge than delegating tasks. If you’d like help strengthening the skills and habits that will make managing engineers feel natural to you, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.