Autonomy and Accountability

Grow’s company motto: “You deserve autonomy, you owe accountability”.

That is a fantastic motto, this is one of the reasons I chose Grow over others. At smaller places, you feel more like a family, you have a sense of trust with your coworkers, you feel safe. At the same time, you have to extend your help, your trust to others. Trust, respect, it is a two way street.

I can enjoy the freedom to do things how I want at a start-up as long as we follow through. It could be a longer process without the guidance, but in the end once I accomplish a task, I feel like I get better.

At big places, like the Big 4 (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon), I am generalizing, but aside, as you scale much larger, and you lose your focus/vision, people can stray away from their work. Then make mistakes, then start blame shifting. Overall they won’t show accountability.

When something goes wrong, I don’t look to someone to blame or to do over my work, sure, it could be someone else’ fault. Firstly I see as to what could have been my mistake. This type of behaviour was probably from the fact that I was always insulted, belittled during my time at SE where I lost most of my confidence in my abilities. Whenever something went wrong, I immediately thought it was my fault.

From my experiences, it is now my character to always owe accountability, even if I’m working at one the larger companies, I will make sure I set the example first, I hope others will see the difference in my behaviour and follow suit.

In the end, you can’t change others directly, it must start from yourself.