↗️ Too much autonomy is not good for you!

‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Abraham Maslow is said to be the source of this quote.

The same can happen, once Leaders add professional coaching to their toolkit. Granted, it’s an exciting skill to build and apply. It opens so many doors!

However, it’s also easy to get carried away and overshoot the target. Hear me out on this.

🔢 Coaching is one style of many.

Coaching is not per se the best Leadership style. It is one style of many.

I teach coaching because most Leaders simply have no idea what good coaching actually is and they simply don’t have it in their toolkit to play with.

When I then teach Leaders coaching skills and they go back to apply it, it’s sometimes similar to getting a driver’s license and having this treacherous feeling of confidence after 5000km on the road. We see successes and we feel like applying this new tool everywhere.

One detail is that we are very conscious about the degree of space we give people around us to come up with own solutions. Here is where you can go overboard by giving too much autonomy.

Moderation is key.

💡 Give autonomy. Not too much. Not too little

In a study, multiple teams were compared. Some were given more autonomy than others in composing their own team. (Source: HBR)

Here’s the result and I quote:

“Our analysis suggested that some — but not total — autonomy yielded the best results. The teams that weren’t allowed to choose either their ideas or their teammates performed the worst, but those with full autonomy performed only marginally better: They were rated as less than 1% more likely to succeed than the teams with no autonomy.

Conversely, the teams that were given some autonomy significantly outperformed both those with full autonomy and those with no autonomy: Teams that could choose either their ideas or their teammates (but not both) were rated as 50% more likely to succeed than those with no autonomy, and 49% more likely to succeed than those with full autonomy. They also received 82% more of the fictional investment budget than those with no autonomy, and 23% more of the budget than those with full autonomy. Overall, the top performing teams were those who were assigned their teammates but allowed autonomy over their ideas, closely followed by those who were assigned ideas and allowed to choose their teams.”

This is insightful on so many levels, and reminds us that great Leader Coaching has lots to do with careful calibration of the degree of autonomy. We should neither be too directive, nor should we be too liberal (laissez-faire). Self-driven, motivated performance is a result of just the right mix of direction, support, delegation and yes, coaching.