One of the things that can prevent impact-driven small-business employers from scaling as fast as they would like, is a reluctance to introduce autonomy into their business.

A reluctance born of discomfort around the idea that autonomy doesn’t mean complete freedom to act. That with autonomy must come responsibility.

Why?

Firstly because you are a legal entity. You can’t let your team do things that would break the law.

Secondly because you are a company, not a crowd. You’re a group of people who have chosen to work together to make and keep a specific Promise of Value to a specific group of customers. There are things you could legally do, that won’t fit into that framework.

So, before you delegate autonomy, as owner, you need to make it clear that if you get to decide how to best to keep the company’s promise for the client in front of you, that freedom comes with responsibility for the consequences.

It sounds brutal, which makes it scary, for both sides of the autonomy handover.

But it is the only way to make that handover real.

One thing that helps is to make sure everyone is absolutely clear on what they are responsible for doing, and where the limits to action are.

I do that through a clear and comprehensive Promise of Value – what the business is here to do for the people it serves, combined with an OurScore a description of what the customer experience should be. It’s called OurScore because like a musical score, it tells people what to play when, but not how to play it.

That way, it works quite simply, as a floor – the least that should happen.

There is no ceiling. And your OurScore can be jazz, if you like, and leave a lot to each player’s ingenuity, provided they come back to the core when needed. In that way it acts as more than a floor, it can be a springboard.

With these structures in place, you can be confident that limits will not be breached, yet still sure that you’ve left plenty of room for personality, creativity and innovation to emerge from all that autonomy.

That means you can feel comfortable handing over your business to the care of everyone that works in it, not just you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.