Building the Autonomous Team

How to Instill a Self-Improvement Mindset in your Team

“Do not try to teach design. Teach principles.” —Frank Lloyd Wright

Team-building and mentorship are integral parts of any leadership role, but if you’re trying to build or grow a business of any size, facilitating growth in your team is an absolute necessity.

In my experience as a general contractor, where I employ people with diverse skillsets and personalities, I’ve found investing in the development of my team members to be both the most challenging and most rewarding part of growing my business.

When I have an employee with a drive to learn, who is attentive and reflective, and who strives toward autonomy, I end up with amazing end-products completed on time. But when I have an employee who struggles to take the reins where he or she can, and looks to me for constant help, the whole team suffers.

After years of seeing the same patterns again and again, I’ve come up with a few key elements that together add up to a kind of philosophy of management. It can be summed up in one simple idea: help team members be more autonomous. This is obviously an oversimplification—let me break it down.

Encourage Employees to Envision the End-goal

The biggest trap employees can fall into is to see their role in a project only as whatever small task they happen to be working on at that moment. When that person compartmentalizes too much, they lose sight of the overall project.

Not only does this cause obvious problems with progress from one step to the next, but more importantly, they become less invested in the larger project and its ultimate success.

To help combat this shortsightedness, I have found that including your whole team in the early stages of a project can be helpful. And when that’s not an option, work to orient the team toward the end goal directly and often.

If you can actively encourage everyone involved to see the end-product clearly, it helps them to communicate more actively with their coworkers and feel that they have more at stake in the overall project.

Maintain Open Channels of Communication

This may sound too obvious to even mention—you already know that communication is the key to getting anything done in a building-oriented business. But what I’m talking about is more than “have your various team members talk to one-another.” I’m saying you must focus on the communication between team members, especially those who complete radically different parts of a project, and that you have to be intentional and transparent about it.

So, for example, I need my concrete sub-contractor to understand what my carpenter needs and vice-versa—they need to learn to speak each-other’s language as they work toward a common end. Improved communication between these two makes their work more efficient, saving time not only in their respective phases of the project, but in the job as a whole.

But the key is to explicitly build this communication into the process. Don’t leave it to chance. Try scheduling a “communication” or “carry-over” meeting where both sit down and sketch out what the other needs before they even begin working.

Not only does this keep everyone oriented toward the right end goal, it encourages them to maintain a constant connection. An hour of conversation could easily save many more hours somewhere down the line.

Teaching the Concept of Transfer

The most important and helpful concept you can teach your team is transfer: the understanding that a certain skill or technique first applied to one task can be transferred to another.

For example, building a cabinet and laying shingles on a roof require surprisingly similar thinking; they both utilize overlays and reveals. The trades may seem unrelated, but both share underlying concepts and skills. So, if someone can recognize the underlying concepts of a trade or task, they can apply that knowledge elsewhere.

The goal is to teach your team members to see themselves not just as specialists in one area (though they can certainly excel in a particular area), but to see themselves as capable builders in general—that craftsmanship is a mindset rather than a set of discrete skills.

Wrap-up

At the end of the day, mentoring and shaping the members of your team into the best versions of themselves takes time and patience, but if you can foster an independent mindset in them and focus more on developing autonomy than on their current particular skill-set, you’ll end up with a team that grows with you and with your business—a team that’s invested as much as you are.

I’d like to further unpack some of these ideas in future posts. I think each of these deserves to be further explored, so more to come later. For now—keep that ball moving forward.

-- Chris Beatty