Buu Nguyen's Blog

Last month, I wrote about autonomy being the number one characteristic of any employee and that the boss should be able to expect his/her staffs to produce satisfactory work all the time as long as they are clear about the objectives. Some people commented back saying that while autonomy is a good thing, such expectation from the boss is unrealistic and the boss should not rely on his staffs’ work product without examining it thoroughly him/herself. And I did express my disagreement in my responses since it is my belief that any project in which the boss cannot expect his staffs to be autonomous, and anybody can assume that s/he can product any mediocre pile of work and there will always be some other people (e.g. the boss) to review his/her works and spot out the problems for him/her then that project is already destined to be doomed. And while I still hold my position on that matter, I realize that I missed one key variable to make my point better argued: competence.
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When we are assigned with a task, we are usually expected to:

1. Provide an estimation of how long it will take to finish the task
2. Go ahead and start working on it
3. Report problems and issues preventing the work from being done
4. Finish the task and report the result

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