In her new book, Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team, Paula Davis, CEO and founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute and author of Beating Burnout at Work, argues that chronic stress, burnout, and employee disengagement have reached crisis levels, and leaders are struggling to keep their teams motivated and inspired amid relentless change and uncertainty.

Drawing on extensive research and workshops with thousands of leaders, she offers guidance for building high-performing teams that can adapt and grow, even in today’s turbulent work landscape. In the book, she identifies the six core drivers of chronic stress and disengagement at work. Lack of autonomy is one of the six: “You want the freedom to be able to do your work free from micromanagement, poor leadership, and ineffective teaming practices. You want a say in how you achieve your goals and the route you take to accomplish tasks and projects.”

The following excerpt from the book focuses on why autonomy is critical to employee engagement and how leaders can identify their team’s autonomy needs.

When you were growing up, did you read any of the books in the Choose Your Own Adventure series? Page by page, you got to decide what the characters did or didn’t do, ultimately informing how the story ended. Another way to think about autonomy is the fundamental need to “choose your own adventure,” both in life and in work. Employees at all levels want the ability to decide for themselves how their work story will unfold, day-to-day, week-to-week, and over the long haul. Autonomy is linked to work engagement, lower rates of burnout, intrinsic motivation, and seeing one’s work as meaningful.

Autonomy challenges can appear in different ways for leaders. A woman named Raquel approached me after a recent workshop. She told me about her new role as a senior leader in a chemical distribution company. She explained that she was having a tough time figuring out how much latitude to provide each of her direct reports. Some wanted a bit more hand-holding, more than she found she had time for, while others felt better with minimal interaction.

Separately, a sales executive and I were talking in the lunch line after one of my workshops, and he said that he and his team had previously enjoyed maximum autonomy in their work. He could directly sign off on projects and resources, and he enjoyed that. But when his small company was eventually acquired by a larger organization, the culture immediately changed. Not only did he and his team lose a lot of autonomy, but that loss also created a sense of unfairness in the form of more organizational politics and red tape, which slowed down his team and created an “us versus them” mentality between existing and new employees.

As a leader, you may need to dial up or dial back how involved you are given your team’s autonomy needs. You may also need to rethink what autonomy looks like.

As a leader, you may need to dial up or dial back how involved you are given your team’s autonomy needs. You may also need to rethink what autonomy looks like.

Broaden Your Thinking about Autonomy

What I often find is that the conversation about workplace flexibility has become too narrow in that it’s usually focused solely on where and when people work. If you think about autonomy more broadly in terms of helping those on your team choose their own adventure, then you open other avenues for building autonomy that you might not have expected. Autonomy is about freedom and choice. There are different types of autonomy at work for you to consider incorporating with your team.

  • Schedule autonomy: Team members have the freedom to choose when and where they work.
  • Task autonomy: The degree of independence team members have in deciding how to perform their job tasks and assignments. You may provide a high-level overview of goals and strategy, and they decide how to get from Point A to Point B.
  • Decision-making autonomy: The authority team members have in making decisions related to their work, such as setting priorities, allocating resources, and solving problems. You are empowered to exercise judgment and discretion in determining the best course of action to take to achieve goals and objectives.
  • Creative autonomy: Teams can explore new ideas, experiment with different approaches, and they are encouraged to innovate and take risks.
  • Career autonomy: You can set career goals, pursue learning opportunities, and make decisions about career path and skill development opportunities.
  • Social autonomy: Your team can choose how to communicate, collaborate, and build relationships with colleagues, clients, and stakeholders.

Time to Reflect

Where are you able to help influence your employees’ autonomy needs? Company policy may prevent you from giving them the flexibility to be fully remote, but can you give them more decision-making autonomy or task autonomy? Better yet, show them a list of different types of autonomy and ask for their input. Also consider that a person’s autonomy needs may change over time.

TNTs to Boost Autonomy

In addition to some of the bigger picture thinking above, these are some Tiny Noticeable Things (TNTs) you can do to increase autonomy.

TNT: Provide Context for Rules and Goals

It’s important to give your team the rationale, explanation, strategic thinking, and/or backstory for assignments and policy or initiative changes. This is the “why.” I call it “showing your mental work.” Doing this unlocks autonomy by providing clarity, more nuanced decision making, and meaning. And it allows the people on your team to exercise judgment about task direction. The person receiving the explanation also equates the “why” or the explanation to being valued.

You can give explanations and rationales by providing context for decisions, rules, and changes; clearly articulating the potential benefits and positive outcomes associated with a rule or change; clearly outlining the expectations, requirements, and implications associated with a rule or change; keeping consistent open lines of communication; and providing updates, adjustments, and evaluations. Transparency is key.

TNT: Empower Decision Making

Team members need to be allowed to make choices about how they pursue their goals and to know the parameters around which they can make decisions about their work. Leaders must provide a clear framework for how a team is to operate when assigning projects or other responsibilities. Your team must know how to answer the following questions*:

  1. What types of decisions do I/we have sole control to make? (Level 1 Decisions).
  2. What types of decisions can I/we make but must also inform leadership? (Level 2 Decisions).
  3. What types of decisions am I/we not allowed to make? (Level 3 Decisions).

Leaders need to be very clear about each of these questions and what their comfort level is, without micromanaging. You might not feel comfortable letting someone new to the organization or new to their career make Level 1 Decisions. Having the ultimate in decision-making latitude needs to be earned. At the same time, this is a process with a learning curve. Establishing clear timelines and deadlines, explaining the level of resources and support available, transparency and sharing of information, and co-creating a check-in schedule will help the entire team better understand how they can proceed.

TNT: Get Everyone on the Same Page

Effective teams are consistently on the same page about direction, priorities, and roles. If you asked everyone on your team to explain the direction of a project, what has priority, and what each person’s role is in executing deliverables, would they all give you the same answer? Your team should regularly discuss and have a clear understanding of what success looks like and what are top priorities, with clear role clarity. Teams can then take control of and feel ownership over their actions.

It’s easy to feel stuck and frustrated trying to figure out how to give your employees that freedom of choice. My goal with this segment is to help you realize that you likely have more levers to push than you think to boost the autonomy needs of your team.

Excerpted from Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team, by Paula Davis, copyright 2025. Reprinted by permission of Wharton School Press.

*Charlie Gilkey (2023). Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results. New York: Hachette Book Group.