I have noticed a pattern in some leaders. When someone is new, or in a stretch role, or coming back from a setback, you pull the leash a little tighter. More check-ins. More approvals. More oversight. The plan is to loosen it once they have proven they can handle it.
You have the order backwards.
What I want you to consider this week is that autonomy is not the prize for past behaviour. It is the condition that makes future behaviour possible. The prove-it-first logic feels responsible, and it may be the very reason your people are not performing at the level you need.
After painful layoffs in 2001, Reed Hastings and his Chief Talent Officer, Patty McCord, noticed something counterintuitive at Netflix. The leaner team, with fewer people and fewer rules, was outperforming the bigger one. They turned that into a deliberate bet: treat employees as fully capable adults, and design the company around that assumption rather than around control. Their 2009 Culture Deck became one of the most studied leadership documents to come out of Silicon Valley; Sheryl Sandberg called it "may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley." The principle was three words. Context not control.
Picture a climbing guide taking a novice up their first lead route. The guide knows the holds; they could be at the top in minutes. But that is not the job. The work happens before the climb: study the route together, agree the signals, name what to do if things go wrong. Then comes the hardest moment. Hand the novice the rope and step back. While the climber climbs, the guide belays. Fully present, reading every move, resisting the pull to shout instructions. And if the climber falls, the belay holds. The fall is not prevented. It is made survivable.
That is what extending autonomy actually looks like. Not abandonment, not absence; deliberate, held space. Netflix never made the freedom unconditional either. Creators got real authority inside a clear frame, because Netflix knew what it needed commercially and was direct about it. The research backs the bet. Self-Determination Theory, built by Deci and Ryan over forty years, names autonomy as one of three universal psychological needs. A meta-analysis by Slemp and colleagues of 72 studies and nearly 33,000 people found leader autonomy support strongly predicts motivation, wellbeing, and positive work behaviours. Gartner's 2022 research found employees with autonomy over when they work are 2.3 times more likely to be high performers, and report 1.9 times less fatigue. Controlling environments do not produce capable people. They produce compliant ones.
Autonomy is not what you hand people when they have proven themselves. It is what you hand them so they can.
The one thing
Hand over one rope this week
Pick the one person you have been quietly managing more tightly than you should. Name a decision you have been holding onto that could be theirs, and give it to them. Say: "This is yours now. Here is what success looks like, here are the non-negotiables, and here is what I will protect you from while you work it through." Then step back, stay close enough to belay, and do not climb it for them.
The leaders who build the strongest teams are not the ones who ration freedom. They are the ones brave enough to extend it first, and steady enough to hold the rope while it takes. So here is the question I would leave you with: whose rope are you still holding that you should have handed over months ago?