How the Shift From Traditional Management Could Create More Value: A Model of Control, Abandonment or Autonomy Supportive

William Deci made a distinction that has greatly influenced me.
He argues that parents, managers and teachers have three options: control, abandonment or autonomy supportive.

Control is when you dictate, monitor and manage goals and process for your student, child or employee. Abandonment is when you simply say, "Do what you'd like." You give them freedom but not support. Autonomy supportive suggests that you defer rather than dictate goals but then offer support - teaching, processes, resources - that enable them to achieve those goals.

My sense is that every decade there are more parents who are autonomy supportive. The parent who says, "He wants to be a skateboarder. We're doing what we can to get him to tournaments and fund lessons," is considered interesting today whereas in the 50s they'd be considered crazy. (But to be fair to folks in the 50s, skateboards were so bad back then that you'd be right to be outraged.)

Among the many things meant by the popularization of entrepreneurship is this notion of autonomy supportive. Rather than dictate processes, you support their goals. What might this look like?

Ricardo Semler - in Brazil - had a fascinating model in his factory. He would have half a dozen workers side by side, each with their own arrangement. One was getting paid by the hour, another by the month and another by piece. Yet another was working in the same area but paying for access to the machinery and then selling the product on her own. It was not haphazard. Each was working to a negotiated arrangement. The person who wanted less risk also had less opportunity for rewards. The person who could get what she could sell the product for had to - of course - find the market for what she was making. Given where they were in their life, their skills and goals, different arrangements might advantage them differently. As so often is the case, as the employees did better, so did the company. As is so rarely the case, employees had a variety of ways to do better.

If work is going to look more entrepreneurial, by definition it will be less defined by someone else and more defined by the worker. And yet the array of resources, skills, and knowledge needed to be successful in any endeavor suggests that there is a huge gap of possibility in the large gap between a traditional entrepreneur who creates a new business and the employee who simply takes a role in such a business. To allow individuals to slide the scale between conformity and autonomy rather than toggle from 1 to 10 suggests all sorts of intriguing possibilities in the relationship between employer and employee, a redefinition of work. Chief among the shifts is moving into a relationship that lets employees define the goals and then supporting them in that.

There was an old quip that customers of the Model T could have any color they wanted as long as it was black. Ford's dominance of the American auto industry was eclipsed by General Motors who offered a wide array of car models and prices. And colors. The notion that you would accommodate the various desires of various customers was revelatory and also resulted in a huge gain in value.
One of the more stunning stats of the modern world is that Amazon offers more than 300 million different products to America's 300 million people.

The notion that those same customers as workers might similarly want variety in their work and how they create value is something we still haven't embraced quite ye. We're still in the "any process or objective you want as long as it is our processes and objectives" stage of employment. My prediction? The shift into autonomy supportive relationships with employees will create even more value than corporations shifting from dictating consumer choices to broadening them.