08/20/2025

Why Autonomy is Essential for Team Success

This helps them make decisions while staying aligned with the mission

My first leadership role was straightforward: a small team of senior engineers building a desktop app. With clear goals and shared values, daily stand-ups kept everything aligned—minimal drama. But as my teams scaled, I shifted to coaching leaders of independent groups operating on longer time horizons. With that shift came increased risk — misalignment, misfires and delays. And as I struggled to balance autonomy with oversight, I fell into a classic trap: swinging between passive and micromanagement.

Entrepreneurial teams create, innovate and solve problems in order to disrupt the status quo. The people most suited to this kind of work are motivated intrinsically: a desire for purpose, a capacity for mastery and a need for autonomy. Leading such teams can be tricky and often not very intuitive — you need to unlock creativity while driving focus and urgency.

There is a way through this uncertainty, and it's not the midpoint between passive and micromanagement. The way through is an engineered system of aligned autonomy.

Please select this link to read the complete article from SmartBrief.