Encouraging Responsible Decision Making In Autonomous Teams

STEAL THIS LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK 🆓 – Intervention Rates: A Data-Driven Approach to Measure Your Effectiveness 📈 Leadership isn’t a reward—it’s about being the right person to help your team succeed. One of the biggest challenges in leadership is managing your time effectively. If you’re spending all your time approving everything, fixing mistakes, or answering questions that your team should handle... You’re not leading—you’re stuck circling the day-to-day. So here’s a leadership framework I use Intervention Rates! This is a simple way to understand how my leadership impacts my team. As a nerd it also makes the "data driven" side of my brain very happy. 🤓 The Three Types of Leadership Interventions 1️⃣ Bottlenecks – When Everything Runs Through You Some decisions should sit with leadership—budgets, major strategy calls, high-level approvals. But if your team can’t move forward because you’re holding onto every little thing, they’re stuck waiting, and you’re buried in decisions. 📌 How to Help: ✔️ To grow and scale, let go of the small stuff. ✔️ Look for areas where decisions could be made without you and empower your team to take action. ✔️ Build systems that enable progress without constant check-ins. ✔️ Ensure your team has clarity and confidence to make decisions without hesitation. 2️⃣ Ownership – When Your Team Hesitates to Act This is when our managers or direct reports aren't calling the shots when they should! If team members aren’t taking ownership, it’s usually because: 🔹 They’re not sure they can make certain decisions. 🔹 They don’t feel empowered or supported. 🔹 They fear making the wrong choice. 📌 How to Help: ✔️ Clarify responsibilities—let them know what they own and where they don’t need your input. ✔️ Encourage independent decision-making—remind them that mistakes are part of growth. ✔️ Reinforce trust—let them know you believe in their ability to make good calls. 3️⃣ Feedback – When Standards Aren’t Being Met Your team wants to do great work—but sometimes, they need clearer direction. This happens when: 🔹 A decision was made incorrectly, and they need coaching. 🔹 The work isn’t up to standard, or expectations weren’t clear. 📌 How to Help: ✔️ Give proactive feedback—don’t wait until something is wrong to guide them. ✔️ Set clear expectations so your team knows what success looks like. ✔️ Reinforce high standards with support, not just criticism. Why This Matters Leadership isn’t about eliminating interventions—your team still needs you. But if your days are filled with endless approvals, corrections, and hand-holding, you won’t have time to focus on big-picture growth and strategy. By tracking your interventions and understanding where your team needs more support, clarity, or confidence, you can help them grow—and free yourself to lead. Teams thrive when their leaders empower and develop them. Not when they micromanage and blame. 😤

I have often been told when advocating for team autonomy that some teams want to be told what to do. They often feel uncomfortable when making decisions. I'm struck by the contrast between that and what we actually do: programming and product development require creativity and adaptability to succeed. If we only do what we're told to do, we'll probably create something that nobody wants to buy, and we'll do that in ineffective ways. So, what gives? The first thing that comes to mind is that a culture of fear drives people towards perceived safety. If you're punished for a "failed" experiment, for example, you will avoid experimentation. Innovation requires rewarding chance-taking. It requires psychological safety, too. (If you've ever been silent in a meeting when you had something to say, you're not in a safe environment.) A lot of this ties into incentive systems as well. If your bonus depends on output, you'll focus on increasing output, even at the expense of basic quality or creating things people want to buy. If your bonus depends on doing what you're told, you won't experiment with new and perhaps better ways of working. If you are rewarded as an individual, you won't work as a team. Even understanding why this is a problem can be a problem. Consider Upton Sinclair's “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Things will start running smoothly only after a "wrong" decision is made and there are positive consequences, like being praised for the attempt. This requires active management participation. Of course, fear of autonomy also comes from never having experienced it. A newly autonomous team can feel adrift at sea, wanting to head for the nearest safe shore in the land of What-we-used-to-do. It's, again, the responsibility of management to provide help and support during the transition.

I often get asked: “How do I make my team more accountable?” The real question that's *actually* being asked though here is: “How do I get my team to be more self-sufficient?” A team that can take care of itself is one that is accountable to itself. Self-sufficiency = Accountability. As a result, to create greater accountability, you want to set up systems and reinforce behaviors that encourage self-sufficiency – rather than dependency on you as a leader. Discouraging dependency as a leader means: 🚫 Avoid being the expert: If someone has a question, make sure you’re sharing the rest of your team the answer and how you got to that answer. Otherwise you become a bottleneck for your team. 🚫 Avoid solving the problem yourself: If someone is stuck or running behind, resist the temptation to jump in and fix it yourself. Otherwise your team will continue to rely on you and won’t learn to solve the problem themselves. Encouraging self-sufficiency in your team means: ✅ Invest the time in teaching: Spend the time to help your team upskill and understand a problem more intimately. Guide them through how you’re thinking about a complex problem, and ask questions to help them come into it on their own. ✅ Give “context clues”: When someone is seeking guidance, and asking for example, “How urgent is this?” Instead of just answering, “Not urgent” you can say, “This is not mission critical and be pushed to next month because…” You’re clueing them into the context to help them get a sense of how to orient going forward. This takes time. More time than just doing the thing yourself. If you’re hesitant to take that time, I get it… However, remember this: Time spent upfront is the only way to avoid time spent later when you’re overwhelmed by being the sole point-of-failure on the team. You break the cycle of dependency when you encourage self-sufficiency. And that is the only way true accountability in a team happens. #accountability #leadershipdevelopment