How to Create Freedom and Autonomy

Excerpted from "Terms of Engagement: Changing The Way We Change Organizations"

Provide variety and challenge. Engaging people in critical organizational change processes provides them with challenging experiences outside their normal job activities. They are exposed to different people, ideas, problems, and decision-making processes.

Provide elbowroom for decision-making. Creating room within the change process for people to make decisions on their own creates the needed elbowroom. The process must allow for input and participation in developing the future. When people can look at a strategy or decision and say that they helped to shape it, they develop a sense of pride in the decision and work to implement it.

Provide feedback and learning. Create situations in which people can learn from each other during the change process. Create "mutual feedback groups" in which one group presents their proposals to another group and receives feedback. Then reverse the process. Not only do the ideas get better, but also both groups learn in the process. Create situations in which people can learn about the organization, the environment in which it finds itself, how the organization is currently responding to changing conditions, and how other organizations have responded to similar situations. This is the learning organization in action.

Build in mutual support and respect. Treating all ideas as valid and all people as having worth goes a long way to create mutual support and respect. When we incorporate the equity and fairness principle, we create mutual support and respect.

Choose topics that have wholeness and meaning. This means engaging people in processes that have value and meaning for both them and the organization. Do not waste engagement on trivial pursuits.

Leave room to grow. This means providing the opportunity for people to show that they can do more than their narrow job descriptions. Do not limit your sense of what is possible by the current job that someone holds. Provide opportunities for people to do more and you will be surprised by the outcomes.

The Axelrod Group, 723 Laurel Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091

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