The Autonomy
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled
Every company of a certain size eventually discovers the gospel of autonomy.
Leaders will speak gravely about empowerment and autonomy. They’ll unveil new "Autonomy Indexes" to measure how much freedom employees feel they have over their work.
The theory is that higher autonomy leads to higher job satisfaction, which is meant to be good for the company.
This all sounds very enlightened. And it is, of course, partly true, however:
The last time I checked, the purpose of a for-profit company is not to maximise the well-being of its employees. The purpose is to create value for customers, which in turn maximises profit for shareholders. Employee satisfaction is a means to that end, not the end itself. It's a useful side effect of winning, not the goal. When you forget this, you start optimizing for the wrong things. You get a happy, comfortable, and thoroughly mediocre company that gets its ass kicked by hungrier competitors.
Let’s be clear: the goal is to make money. So, how does autonomy fit into that?
For the company, granting autonomy is a high-leverage bet. An autonomous employee or team can move faster. They don't need to wait for six layers of management to approve a decision. They are closer to the problem and can, in theory, solve it more effectively. This is a good deal for the company, but only if two conditions are met:
The decisions are good.
The people are acting in the company's best interest.
An autonomous employee who is brilliant but lazy is a net negative. An autonomous team that is hardworking but incompetent is a disaster. And an autonomous operator who optimises for their own career at the expense of the customer is a cancer(this case is a bit special as - right question to ask why incentives are not aligned → But you can read about it here )
Autonomy, then, is not a right or a perk. It is a tool given to people who can be trusted to wield it correctly. And trust requires a mechanism for verification.
This mechanism is called accountability.
The relationship between these two forces is brutally simple. It’s a law.
The amount of autonomy you can grant is directly proportional to the rigor of your accountability system.
The more freedom you give, the better your ability to measure the outcome of that freedom must be. If you have a weak, slow, or vague system for measuring results, granting wide-ranging autonomy is suicide. It's like giving a teenager the keys to a supercar with no speedometer, no GPS, and a promise to "check in next quarter."
A proper accountability system is not about blame. It is about clarity and consequences. It measures what matters—customer value, revenue, system performance—and makes the results visible to everyone. When you have this, autonomy works. People who deliver results get more scope. People who don't, don't. The system self-corrects.
This also solves the seniority problem. Autonomy it’s not only a function of your title; it's a function of your proven track record of accountability. A junior engineer has autonomy over the function they are writing. The CTO has autonomy over the entire technology strategy. The scope of their freedom is matched by the weight of their accountability.
The most common failure mode is the senior leader who uses the language of autonomy as a shield. They'll say, "I believe in empowering my teams, so they own this decision." When the decision proves to be a mistake, the same leader will say, "The team has full autonomy, and we will work with them to learn from this."
This is a perversion of the concept. They are delegating the decision but deflecting the accountability. True leadership is accepting a level of accountability that is greater than the autonomy you personally exercise.
So, if you want a more autonomous culture, don't start by talking about feelings or trust falls.
Start by building a ruthless, transparent system of accountability.
The right people will flourish.
The wrong people will leave.
And that’s exactly the outcome you want.