Mini-masterclass with Tomina Apiti, veteran, researcher, board director, and coach.
Autonomy at work builds as your leader works through a series of questions about you. Can I trust you to do the work? To keep me sighted? To solve things without creating more work for me? Each one you clear gives you more room to move.
After spending nearly two decades in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, Tomina found herself in East Timor. As the most junior person on her team, she got left to load a plane that had to leave before dark (she made it, just 😅). She’s come a long way since, now sitting on national boards across justice, international development and advocacy, and works as a researcher and coach.
💡 Trust builds in five levels: Deliver, Inform, Understand, Create Capacity and Extend Leadership. It starts with whether people can count on us to do the work and end with them trusting our judgement when they’re not around. We can be at level five with one person and back at the start with a new manager.
💡 Know what to pass up and what to handle: Telling our manager everything is as unhelpful as telling them nothing, because they’re left figuring out what’s important. Before we take something to them, ask whether they need to act, decide, or know about it, or would get caught by surprise if we said nothing. If it’s no to all four, it probably doesn’t need to go up.
💡 Notice the permission you’ve got used to asking for: When Tomina’s commander left with no replacement, she suddenly had nobody to check with, so she had to make the calls herself. There’s probably something we still run past our manager out of habit. Some of these check-ins we need – and some we could drop.
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