Leverage Weekly #68 - Gauging autonomy

tl;dr - Team members with aligned goals can often be given freer reign

In a previous essay, I proposed that people need oversight when they lack motivation or the skills to complete that task. When they have the motivation and skills, the best answer is often to simply get out of their way. With careful selection and monitoring, it is possible to end up with a company where the people are motivated to perform well at their jobs and have the ability to do so. In these cases, the need for oversight diminishes substantially.

As motivation/skill/task fit increases and the degree of oversight decreases, surprising things may sometimes happen. Employees may proactively report when they are having problems with tasks, rather than hiding problems and managing their managers’ ability to perceive what is really happening. Candid discussions about motivation and skill fit can happen, especially if approached delicately. It can even become possible for people to change roles seamlessly, moving up, down, or laterally as more fitting roles are identified over time.

Most importantly, people’s performance can improve in ways that are totally unexpected. People can start proactively taking on tasks that, in retrospect, should have been part of their job description but were not. People may approach their tasks and activities in new ways, including ways that one would never have thought of oneself. This sort of effect requires that the person actually be a good fit for the job, both in terms of motivation and skill. Once that fit is achieved, however, great things can start to happen.

The biggest challenge of building a company where people have suitable roles and operate with less than ordinary oversight involves gauging the person’s capacity for autonomy. This can be quite difficult to do, since one can always encounter grifters who would like to operate without oversight and also without doing their job. By paying careful attention, it becomes possible to make good decisions about who can manage themselves and who still needs oversight and guidance.

The challenge of gauging autonomy can be illustrated through examples. Suppose that a member of staff finds themselves suddenly and persistently preoccupied. They know that they are supposed to be researching the economic history of China. Yet they find themselves hopelessly stuck reading about the military history of Japan. Imagine that one has previously assessed them as completely motivated to perform well at their job and completely in possession of relevant skills. Why, then, are they researching the wrong thing?

There are three different scenarios that should be considered. The first is that they, by some idiosyncratic subtle intuition, have divined that actually, reading about the military history of Japan is the best and most direct way to accomplish the goals of their position or the organization as a whole. The second is that they have an affinity for that topic that falls outside the scope of their work, but they haven’t found an appropriate venue for it in their personal life yet. The third is that they are goofing off.

Conversation can often resolve the uncertainty. In many cases, especially in a mid-to-high trust work environment, people are simply willing to say that they think something is important but don’t know why, or that they’re sorry and are trying to get back on task. When talking to people, it is important to understand that they do not always understand themselves; in some cases, they may have a special and accurate intuition, but be trying to write it off as an unnecessary distraction.

In many cases, a person’s character and life experience are especially beneficial inputs when considering whether a person might be following some special intuition — or hesitating for a secretly well-founded reason. People who have successfully faced and overcome serious obstacles often have instincts from earlier in life that serve them well now. But even such people can find themselves trapped in unproductive cycles, where their actual capacity of well-regulated autonomy is low. That’s why correctly gauging where people are and what they’re actually doing is so important.

Team members with aligned goals can often be given freer reign.

As in previous weeks, the main focus the week before last was quantum biology, with support for the Quantum Biology Institute as the single largest activity. The weekly presentation was on respecting diversity, especially cognitive diversity, within the staff. That’s a topic that it’s easy to pay lip service to, but is actually very important, especially on multidisciplinary intellect-heavy projects.

Apart from that, Geoff spent most of his time writing Leverage Weeklies and managing Anna, who is helping QBI with fundraising. Oliver took a side quest into learning about scientific units (“gram-molecules”) studying Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian motion. Melinda worked on a bunch of concretely valuable things: planning the Q3 retreat, helping QBI set up more of their payroll system, and also helping QBI to apply for exemption from sales tax in California.

The choice to prioritize the Leverage Weeklies (and the Leverage Monthly which came out last week) is an interesting one, since current readership is low. It’s defensible at least in that it is getting out a bunch of the organizational wisdom that Leverage has been accumulating for more than a decade. Plus, the topics are inspired by recent events and articulation helps to finish many thoughts that aren’t quite yet complete.

One project that the team is taking on is a review of the fundraising landscape for science in general. It’s not clear, possibly to anyone, where exactly science funding is coming from, which might explain why people don’t know where to look when science funding dries up. Hopefully, a brief survey will help to make matters clearer, which in turn can be helpful for groups like QBI as they continue trying to raise money.

Note: This Leverage Weekly covers the week of May 26-30.