There is a thread on our internal Slack where two leaders argue about what leadership actually means in our context. Someone there is trying to draw a line between autonomy and going it alone. The definitions arrived fast. Autonomy is deciding without waiting to be told, while reflecting on when to align, ask, or offer support - taking responsibility for the effects your action has on the team and the shared goal. Going it alone is deciding in isolation, without feedback, without reflection, offloading costs and risks onto others while optimizing locally. Something works from your seat and creates rework, confusion, or damage from someone else's. The distinction is not who decides. It is how consciously the action is embedded in the shared context.
Now watch how your org actually rewards those two behaviors - regardless of the outcome.
Someone builds consensus. Talks to five stakeholders. Makes their dependencies visible. Adjusts based on pushback. Ships in three weeks. They look slow, unsure, political.
Someone else calls a decision on Monday. Ships the same thing in three weeks. They look decisive, sharp, a real operator.
Same outcome. Different narrative. The autonomy tax and the going-it-alone bonus operate quietly in every performance review, every "who's on the shortlist" conversation, every stretch assignment. The dictator gets the credit; the aligner pays a tax nobody put on the invoice.
That tax has a name and a beneficiary. It punishes the behavior any healthy org needs to survive at scale - checking assumptions against expert opinions, and against the people who will implement them, making dependencies visible early, asking questions across team boundaries, offering help outside your own scope as a form of shared responsibility. It rewards the shortcut: do not check, do not ask, do not risk being told no. And it does this without any explicit policy, purely through the vibes of who "moves faster."
Proactive communication beyond your own team is not interference. Asking is not weakness. Offering support to someone whose problem is technically not yours is not a distraction. Those are the behaviors our Slack thread is quietly reaching for when it tries to define autonomy - and we need to make sure our promotion process does not punish them when it calls them slow.
Slow is what great leadership looks like.