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.
Why autonomy matters
Leading entrepreneurial teams effectively takes effort, so let’s start with the benefits autonomy has for entrepreneurial teams.
Autonomy maximizes the brainpower and horsepower teams apply to complex problems. It’s far more effective to tackle uncertainty with a team of independent thinkers aligned on purpose than to rely on one person’s insight. Distributing creativity across the team increases both momentum and impact.
Autonomy enables scale by unlocking parallel problem-solving. Whether designing breakthrough products or running global systems in real time, distributed autonomy allows teams to move faster and do more — without being bottlenecked by top-down control.
Autonomy also attracts and retains entrepreneurial talent — the creators, innovators and problem-solvers who thrive on ownership. While command-and-control systems suppress deviation, autonomy encourages the initiative and rapid learning required to navigate uncertainty.
Aligned autonomy
Trust is the cornerstone of autonomy. Autonomy means delegating ownership to an individual or team. The ownership and control may not be unlimited, but they are still delegated. This is impossible to do without trust. In my experience, though, people often think about this trust in the wrong way — “Can I trust this person to do this really critical thing?” This misses the point.
To unlock effective autonomy across an entrepreneurial team, you must engineer a system for distributed work that relies on a specific kind of trust — trust in a system of peers and practices designed to guide distributed decision-making and self-correct errors. I call this aligned autonomy. Here are its key ingredients.
- Transparency so any stakeholder can assess progress, opportunities and risk; this lets everyone involved solve actual problems, not red herrings.
- Alignment to vision, mission, values and co-developed strategy, goals, and metrics to ensure that autonomous creativity and problem-solving have a common direction.
- Iteration through feedback, steering and constructive disruption to adjust to changing conditions, solve multidisciplinary problems and continuously improve over time.
Aligned autonomy in practice
Toward the end of 2015, soon after I became chief product officer at Roblox, it became clear to me that 2015 should be a year of growth — I was keyed into the numbers, but there was also a groundswell of support for growth, from our CEO and across the team. We set a goal of 100% year-over-year player growth, an increase from our recent 30% trend. Then, we established a steering group to guide the overall effort, and we defined growth on our terms — an increase in activation, engagement and retention through player-friendly features (not gimmicks) that aligned with our new vision of being an Imagination Platform.
We handed this core set of ideas (vision, mission, strategy, goals and metrics) to fifteen or so product teams across the company to develop area-specific strategy and kick off iterative development. So not only did ideas flood in from across the company, but effort ran in parallel, improving the product across the board iteratively and simultaneously. From all this, I put together a comprehensive dashboard of progress across the teams to share at All Hands.
The effort required regular steering and sometimes significant course correction, but by the end of 2015, we achieved our goal, increasing player growth to just over 100%. And by the end of 2016, with additional work, we increased again by almost 400%. That’s just about 10X growth in two years. Those two years were some of the most exciting and productive in my time at Roblox, and we achieved it through an autonomy built on transparency, alignment and iteration.
The right kind of leadership
The difference between micromanagement and aligned autonomy is the difference between task management and systems engineering. Competent leaders of intrinsically motivated teams build systems optimized for team-based creativity, innovation and problem-solving — systems defined by practices, principles and feedback loops. These leaders engineer the system and coach the participants. They are more involved, more in the loop and have greater long-term control over performance than top-down micromanagement leaders. They coach teams through objectives, continuously helping them level up and achieve better outcomes. And they engineer the entire organization for enduring mastery and aligned autonomy.
This type of leadership is not a blend of passive management and micromanagement. It does not abdicate, and it does not remove agency. It is detail-oriented, continuously setting the bar higher by identifying gaps in performance or impact. This type of leadership solves problems alongside others as a partner, ensuring that all expertise is leveraged, including its own. It actively participates in the team’s engagement channels, cultivating an openness to informal feedback and arriving ready to contribute to formal activities. It is willing to disrupt when hypotheses get busted by data and willing to be disrupted when others do the same.
Competent entrepreneurial leadership is enthusiastic and curious. It is committed to the team’s growth. And most of all, it is a true believer in mission. These leaders unlock teams through aligned autonomy and the pursuit of mastery toward purpose. This is not for everyone, and many who try fail. But success is exhilarating.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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