How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can’t requisition a $300 office chair without a manager’s approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we’d realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual’s freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.

...even if your employees spend a little more when you give them freedom, the cost is still less than having a workplace where they can’t fly. If you limit their choices by making them check boxes and ask for permission, you won’t just frustrate your people, you’ll lose out on the speed and flexibility that comes from a low-rule environment.

Once you have a workforce made up nearly exclusively of high performers, you can count on people to behave responsibly. Once you have developed a culture of candor, employees will watch out for one another and ensure their teammates’ actions are in line with the good of the company. Then you can begin to remove controls and give your staff more freedom. Great places to start are the lifting of your vacation, travel, and expense policies. These elements give people more control over their own lives and convey a loud message that you trust your employees to do what’s right. The trust you offer will in turn instill feelings of responsibility in your workforce, leading everyone in the company to have a greater sense of ownership.

People desire and thrive on jobs that give them control over their own decisions. Since the 1980s, management literature has been filled with instructions for how to delegate more and “empower employees to empower themselves.” The thinking is exactly what we’ve heard from Paolo. The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work. Telling employees what to do is so old-fashioned, it leads to screams of “micromanager!” “dictator!” and “autocrat!

When you read about Freedom and Responsibility at Netflix, it’s easy to get lost in the lovely idea of Freedom without properly considering the accompanying weight of Responsibility. Being the informed captain and signing off on your own contracts is a case in point. Although Reed certainly doesn’t intend to induce fear and trembling in his workforce, part of the reason that F&R works so well is because people do feel the burden of the responsibility that comes with the freedom and make extra efforts accordingly.