On autonomy, feedback, and finding an effective style of our own
Professional development is supposed to make us grow. We take feedback, adapt to different personalities, and get exposed to different ways of working.
But sometimes feedback is just the method the person giving it would have chosen. Of course, this is one way we can learn.
But when does adapting turn into conforming?
Feedback is necessary, and leaders should set expectations and challenge behavior. But sometimes I ask myself whether this particular feedback leaves someone more capable, or just more similar to the person developing them.
The discomfort that comes with growth
While researching, I found out about Herminia Ibarra’s work on the authenticity paradox. Authenticity, she argues, is often used as a reason to stay exactly as we are.
New responsibilities do require new behavior, and it usually feels wrong at first. You might have to be more assertive than is comfortable, or more diplomatic, or slower to decide than you’d like. Ibarra’s point is that the discomfort isn’t proof of inauthenticity. Often it’s just proof of being new at something.
I found her advice interesting:
“Growth necessarily involves some form of imitation, but don’t copy just one person’s leadership style. Borrow selectively from various people to create your own collage.”
If you borrow from many people, what you get is yours. If you borrow from just one person, it belongs to them.
That’s the version of growth I recognize. Trying a new approach gives us one more thing we can do. It doesn’t have to cost us the thing we could already do.
Adding options instead of replacing them
A meta-analysis by Gavin Slemp and colleagues pooled 72 studies covering 32,870 people. Where leaders supported their team’s independence, motivation came more from within. That support showed no clear link to the kind of motivation that comes from feeling pressured. The authors describe the controlling version of leadership as “prescriptive, inflexible, and rigid,” pressuring employees to think, feel, or behave in particular ways.
Autonomy doesn’t mean the absence of standards, which is how it’s often misread. An organization can define what needs to be achieved. A manager can give hard feedback, set boundaries, and hold people to account. None of that requires everyone to do things the same way.
For instance, two colleagues can go into the same supplier discussion to negotiate and not sound the same: one can be direct, the other more diplomatic and indirect, and both come out with terms worth signing. What they had in common was the preparation and knowing where we would stop.
So, I see a difference between helping someone improve and making them do things my way. I believe that feedback that helps someone understand their impact gives them more choices. However, feedback that suggests there is only one acceptable way to communicate limits their options.
For me, this kind of development can look like conformity. In that case, a person keeps up a style that doesn’t fit their personality, their values, or how they see themselves.
I couldn’t find research that tests directly whether managers develop people in their own image. The studies show what happens when people are pressured into prescribed behavior. The step from one to the other is my own reading.
Outcomes and routes
Gallup is useful on the practical side. It describes micromanagement as controlling individual decisions instead of defining outcomes and supporting people in reaching them. It also finds that employees are 43% less likely to experience high levels of burnout when they can choose what tasks they do, when they do them, and how much time they spend on them.
Its older work on management puts it more bluntly: “The best managers tell us they define the right outcomes first, and then let each person find his or her own route toward those outcomes.”
But that doesn’t mean autonomy is always the answer. Path-goal theory has been around since the 1970s, and it suggests that clear direction helps most when roles are unclear, tasks aren’t well defined, and people aren’t yet sure what success looks like. Some tasks need to be standardized because mistakes can be costly.
I believe it’s crucial to ask ourselves why we provide specific directions and consider whether we are safeguarding a result or simply expressing how we would have done it.
Standards and preferences
Janelle Wells and Doreen MacAulay wrote about “invisible mending”. This was a really interesting read for me as it highlighted a lot of the “work” that people do to fit within a workplace and also what we may be missing by trying to fit within certain expectations or shapes of work.
While I acknowledge the need for standards, there are two things that tend to get confused: A standard is what good work requires, and a preference is how one person likes to see something done.
When we get them confused, though, all of a person’s development efforts can shift from trying to make them effective at their work to trying to make them recognizable while doing good work at it.
A better outcome
The optimal result isn’t imitation, but selection; having a variety of means of communicating, deciding and responding, and leaving sufficient room for a person to work out which of these actually belong to them.
The difference is that one type of development leaves a person with more ways of working than they had before, while the other leaves them with less.
It’s possible that the best result won’t be someone who becomes more and more like the person who is developing them, but it might instead be someone who has acquired a greater number of ways of being effective, while at the same time developing a style that remains clearly their own.
Sources
Ibarra, H. (2015). “The Authenticity Paradox.” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/01/the-authenticity-paradox
Slemp, G. R., Kern, M. L., Patrick, K. J. & Ryan, R. M. (2018). “Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review.” Motivation and Emotion, 42(5), 706–724. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9698-y
Gallup. “How to Prevent Employee Burnout.” https://www.gallup.com/workplace/313160/preventing-and-dealing-with-employee-burnout.aspx
Gallup Business Journal (March 22, 1999). “Item 1: Knowing What’s Expected.” https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/499/item-knowing-whats-expected.aspx
House, R. J. (1971). “A Path Goal Theory of Leader Effectiveness.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 16(3), 321–339.
Wells, J. E. & MacAulay, D. (August 2024). “Invisible Mending: The Silent Struggle of Conforming at Work.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-invisible-work/202408/invisible-mending-the-silent-struggle-of-conforming-at-work
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