Something a lot of people in tech want is autonomy. It’s often highlighted as a pro of working somewhere, or a lack of it contributes to wanting to leave. But what is autonomy, and how can you get it?

🌏 Autonomy is everywhere

Even if you don’t feel like you have complete autonomy at work, there are opportunities everywhere. Maybe you don’t have control or influence over those management-level decisions about strategy, resourcing, or partnerships, but you can own things underneath them.

Recognising where you are not going to have an opportunity to be autonomous is really important for keeping your sanity. I’ve worked in teams where we’ve all been frustrated at things we were never going to be able to influence, and it’s not fun. In others, we’ve recognised that while we can’t own everything, we can make sure we execute the way we want to on what we do have, and that’s really empowering.

♟ Discovering opportunities for autonomy

An exercise I used to run with my product teams is the Health Check (which I’ll write about in more detail soon), and one of the questions is directly related to autonomy as a team. We ask the team if they feel like Players or Pawns:

“Players” is the definition I like to use for fully autonomous teams. It still has a lot of room for interpretation. Some people will read “we decide what to build” and think it means that you can just do whatever you want without consulting with stakeholders. My personal interpretation is that we decide on what the right solution is as a team – but not necessarily that we have control or scope over the problem we decide to solve.

If you find yourself getting frustrated frequently at your lack of autonomy, try marinating on this one a bit – how could you reframe your work to be more of a player? For example…

• Maybe you don’t get to prioritise what features to work on, but you get a lot of influence on prioritising within the feature.

• Maybe you don’t get to directly influence the content strategy, but you can use your judgement to decide on how to best execute on it.

• Maybe you don’t get to pick and choose the stakeholders for a project, but you can design a communication strategy based on your best judgement.

Unless you’re in a role where you have to do everything exactly as scripted all the time, there is room in your job for autonomy.

🙃 Reality checks

Nobody at work is operating fully autonomously. It’s not possible. Even if you’re the boss, you have other stakeholders, customers, and investors to work with. But regardless of how senior you are, you can carve out some control for yourself.

And the level of autonomy you want will change over time. You might crave different kinds of autonomy when you’re early in your career vs when you’re more senior, or you might have events in your life that affect how much you want to take on at work. There is no ideal amount of autonomy to look for in a job, just what suits you right now.

Finally, the amount of autonomy you get to maintain will depend on how trustworthy, reliable, and effective you are. If you demonstrate that you can’t be trusted to make your own decisions, you’ll find that you have less of it. Conversely, you can also gain more autonomy and influence as you prove that you’re using it wisely.

So there you have it – acting autonomously isn’t about having complete control over everything, it’s about finding opportunities you can own and taking charge of them. Next time you feel frustrated by your lack of autonomy – even if you can’t change the outcome – consider how you can feel more like a player than a pawn.

(I used the word “autonomy” 15 times in this post. Has it lost all meaning?)