A constant theme in leadership literature is that employees should have a degree of autonomy, which is directly tied to engagement. While there is much I could challenge about the notion of engagement, I want to focus on what it means to have autonomy. Or better still, what it would mean to truly be free at work. This week, we will examine a definition of freedom; next week, we will examine the role of choice and indifference in freedom.
Since the birth of philosophy, there has been a debate about whether free will exists and whether or not events are predetermined. I won’t directly address that question here, but I will look at what it means and whether we can have freedom at work.
What is freedom?
In their work, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow define three forms of freedom as ”the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations.” 1
This is the first frame to consider regarding freedom. Through this lens, we can see where freedom, by this definition, exists in the workplace.
Freedom of movement
Some companies provide the freedom to move between roles internally; this tends to be available at larger organizations more than smaller ones. However, this generally becomes more constrained as you progress in your career. While moving from one junior role to another may be easier as a junior employee, when you have more experience, significant role changes often require a step back regarding level or salary.
Indeed, there is freedom to change jobs. However, that is also quite constrained. Many employees, financially, cannot quit a job until they have another lined up, depending on the state of the job market. Also, there are no guarantees that leaving one job would improve the conditions as the new job could be the same. While cultures vary from one organization to another (the question of culture is something I will address in a future newsletter), most technology organizations are either venture-funded, private equity-owned, or publicly traded and, therefore, have similar governance and underlying ideology.
Another contemporary alternative to provide free movement is the solopreneur trend. The idea is that you can build a business by yourself. This is certainly more possible than it has even been in history. This is a path for some, but it isn’t a choice everyone can make, nor can all businesses succeed as solo ventures.
In the end, we all need to sell our labor power, and while the choice to do so may feel like freedom, it actually is one of the parts of our lives that show the most dependence on others, as Jason Read elucidates in his book Double Shift:
selling one’s labor power, working for a living, is often taken as the epitome of autonomy and self-reliance. It is seen as synonymous with the freedom from dependence on others, whether in the form of an immediate dependence on family or of the more indirect, and withering, dependence on state or public assistance. However, this independence comes at a cost of dependence, first and foremost on the particular employer, but also on the conditions of that particular capitalist—technological and social—and, ultimately, on the entire status of the world market. This process goes on behind people’s backs, as Marx argued. Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any one person to grasp the way in which their simple act of going to work each day is itself dependent on a slew of social, political, and technological conditions that remain out of sight and largely out of mind. 2
Freedom to disobey orders
The freedom to disobey orders is limited in most workplaces. You may be able to challenge what you are told to do. Many technology companies have adopted the “disagree and commit” mentality, which allows individuals to disagree with decisions but then requires you to accept and support the decisions made.
In this view, the right to voice an objection is seen as a form of freedom, but it also recognizes that, in the end, you will need to conform to the choices made. And essentially, do as you are told. Some could suggest that you can’t be forced to do anything and that you have consented when taking the job. The earlier consent to work for a given company was consent to do what is asked of you. Therefore, it was a free choice.
“In the subject’s relationship to the community to which he belongs, there is always such a paradoxical point of choix forcé – at this point, the community is saying to the subject: you have freedom to choose, but on condition that you choose the right thing; you have, for example, the freedom to choose to sign or not to sign the oath, on condition that you choose rightly – that is, to sign it. If you make the wrong choice, you lose freedom of choice itself. And it is by no means accidental that this paradox arises at the level of the subject’s relationship to the community to which he belongs: the situation of the forced choice consists in the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he already belongs, independent of his choice – he must choose what is already given to him.” 3
To some extent, being at the company is a choice made in advance. The choice to obey beyond that is a forced choice. However, we cling to that initial choice to show that even the choices we disagree with and follow feel like choices.
In other words, because we believe we are free, we assume our choices are our own; why else would we make them?
“The individual-subject imagines itself to be a free being, endowed with an autonomous will, whose actions are the effects of its sovereign volition: hence, had I wanted emancipation strongly enough, I would have been able to escape my condition of servitude; consequently, if I am in this condition, it must be the fault of my will, and my servitude has to be voluntary. Under such a metaphysics of subjectivity, voluntary servitude is doomed to remain an insoluble enigma.” 4
As a mental exercise, imagine taking the stance of Bartleby in Herman Melville’s The Scrivener. When your boss asks you to do additional work, say, “I would prefer not to.” It likely will not end well. We are trained to see new asks as opportunities rather than the extra work that we know they are.
Freedom to reorganize social relations.
The worker’s rights movement has primarily focused on this freedom. The ability for workers to unionize is perhaps the critical way that employees can reorganize social relations, but other ways involve employee representation in governance. This can also be seen as switching to flat organizations or holarchies, and while each of these notions has challenges, they offer different forms of social relations at work. The issue is that these relations are still primarily imposed by the organization’s leadership rather than chosen by the employees themselves. Employees having a say in organizing is difficult to actualize, but I will explore it more in future newsletters.
What does this mean as a middle manager?
How can you help your employees with each type of freedom?
Freedom of Movement: This is the easiest in many ways. As a middle manager, you can create opportunities within your team to hire people who have taken nontraditional pathways and are looking to explore new roles. You can also help your team members change jobs both within and, even more importantly, outside your current company.
Freedom to Disobey: Encourage people to say no. Make it okay to refuse new work and responsibilities. This can be challenging because we may need to manage and resist requests that come to us and fight for those who said no to be rewarded for the refusal rather than punished.
Freedom to Reorganize Social Relations: This is perhaps the hardest thing for a middle manager to do. However, you can limit the role of hierarchy within your teams and allow them to organize sensibly. This may be a limited shift in social relations, but it can be impactful.
Next week, we will examine the role of choice in freedom and offer some thoughts on how we can emancipate ourselves and our teams.