Autonomy as Selfish Leadership
Let people bring themselves to the work; you trade a little visibility for higher velocity, morale, and results.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Reshef frames autonomy not as generosity but as self-interest: you get more from everybody when you let them do things their own way within limits. The mechanism is illustrated by the picnic 'bring your own thing' story — assigning a rigid checklist yields the lowest common denominator, while telling people to bring whatever they want yields a feast, because personality and pride enter the work. Applied to product, teams own their decisions; the leader gives feedback but doesn't control every feature.
Origin
Eilon Reshef credits the core insight to a parent at his son's school picnic who proposed replacing the standard ingredient checklist with 'just tell everybody bring your own thing'. He generalized it into a management principle at Gong and applies it to parenting too.
Core principles
- 01A rigid checklist produces the lowest common denominator; open ownership produces peak effort
- 02People bring their personality and pride when they choose their own contribution
- 03Autonomy keeps people thinking and motivated — better results short and long term
- 04The trade is explicit: more control for people means less visibility for you
How to run it
- 1
As leader, sign up to let go
Accept that you won't control everything and will tolerate more mistakes than you otherwise would. This willingness is the precondition.
Watch out If you can't personally tolerate the loss of control, the model will not hold.
- 2
Get your peers on the same boat
Align your executive peers (head of sales, finance) who will ask 'how do I know what's happening?' There must be fundamental trust between you and your colleagues to even experiment this way.
Pro tip Treat sales, product marketing, and CS as part of a 'virtual pod' so they stay informed without you gatekeeping every feature.
Watch out This peer-alignment is the harder half — harder than letting go yourself.
- 3
Push decision-ownership down to the team
Make it each person's responsibility to decide whether to act on a customer idea, escalate, or seek more input. No punishment for acting on their own judgment; the responsibility to gauge their own confidence is theirs.
Pro tip Autonomy includes deciding 'do I know enough / how far up do I go?' — that self-assessment is part of the job.
- 4
Make review pull-based, not push-based
Provide a standing weekly review session teams can bring work to, but require them to initiate and drive the review rather than forcing it on them.
Watch out Accept you'll lose some ongoing visibility — that's the cost you knowingly pay for velocity and morale.
In the wild
At a school picnic, the usual method was a checklist of ingredients, and parents rushed to claim the easiest item (a bottle of water), producing a mediocre spread. A parent proposed telling everyone to bring their own thing. People instead drove to specialty stores and baked, producing a genuine feast — and everyone was happier. They repeated it every year and it worked every time.
→ Higher-quality contributions and higher happiness, reproduced annually.
Reshef never installed control software on his kids' devices, treating self-protection as their responsibility. After negotiating a two-hour computer limit, his daughter came to him three days running asking him to install limiting software to help her — flipping him from enforcer to helper.
→ The person took ownership of the constraint themselves, which is the whole point of the model.
Common mistakes
Optimizing for control and visibility
Leaders erring on the side of more control get the lowest-common-denominator output — like the checklist picnic. The visibility feels safer but caps the ceiling on quality and engagement.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and engineering leaders who want higher velocity and morale and can tolerate reduced visibility and more mistakes
Not ideal for
Highly regulated or one-way-door-heavy environments, or leaders whose peers demand feature-level visibility they can't relinquish
From the transcript
“it's a very selfish thing it's a very personal thing”
“just tell everybody bring your own thing”
“if you give people more control by definition you're going to have less visibility in what you're doing so give up a little bit of…”
“she came to me three days in a row could you please install the software on my machine so I can help me like control…”
From the episode
Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more
Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO)