If you want to scale your leadership, you have to scale trust. That means letting go of control—not blindly, but progressively.
- Adrian Lee
The Freedom Ladder is a simple but powerful tool for thinking about how leaders delegate work and decision-making. At each rung of the ladder, the balance between managerial control and individual autonomy shifts until responsibility is fully owned by the contributor.
This model is especially useful for Staff-plus engineers who need to scale impact by empowering others, not just doing the work themselves.
What is the Freedom Ladder?
The Freedom Ladder defines five levels of autonomy:
- Wait until told – The individual takes no action without instruction.
- Ask what to do next – The individual signals readiness, but defers decision-making.
- Suggest, check before acting – The individual proposes action, manager approves.
- Report afterwards – The individual acts independently, then updates the manager.
- Free to act, routine reporting only – Full autonomy within defined boundaries.
Each step up the ladder gives the individual more challenge and fulfillment, while freeing the manager to focus on strategic objectives.
The ladder implicitly addresses varying levels of grip: how tightly or loosely a manager holds control over outcomes. That grip should shift based on the person’s experience, the risk of the work, and the urgency of results.
Why it matters at Staff-plus level
In a Staff-plus role, you are the system. You aren’t just delivering on your own work you’re enabling others. The Freedom Ladder helps you think clearly about who should own what, and how much autonomy they’re ready for.
Some examples:
- New engineers might start at “Ask what to do next.”
- A Staff engineer taking on new domain work may be at “Suggest check before acting.”
- A senior IC with proven judgment might be operating at “Report afterwards” or “Free to act.”
Helping others climb this ladder is one of the most powerful ways to build a resilient, high-performing team.
Internal visibility
Your role isn’t just to give freedom, but to do so transparently in a way that shows thoughtful delegation rather than disengagement.
You can create internal visibility by:
- Making expectations explicit: “I trust you to decide and just report back.”
- Communicating changes in delegation style: “You’ve earned full autonomy here.”
- Documenting ladders or delegation levels for different projects.
- Encouraging retros on autonomy and decision-making.
Well-documented and well-explained delegation boosts psychological safety and reinforces that autonomy is earned, not assumed.
Executive visibility
Executives don’t just want to know what you did they want to know how you scaled yourself. Moving your team members up the Freedom Ladder is a powerful narrative in a promotion packet or stakeholder review.
You can show this by:
- Describing how you reduced your own control on a critical project.
- Showing growth in a teammate’s decision-making maturity.
- Highlighting a system or protocol you put in place that lets others act autonomously.
When you increase others’ autonomy responsibly, you increase the system’s capacity an executive-level trait.
External visibility
The Freedom Ladder is also a great tool to share externally as part of your leadership narrative. Consider:
- Writing a blog post about how you helped an engineer “earn” full autonomy.
- Giving a talk about scaling trust and ownership in distributed teams.
- Creating an internal playbook or guide for engineering leads on using the ladder.
- Coaching others through delegation and control handoff.
When you share how autonomy works in practice not just theory you elevate your leadership presence across the org and beyond.
Should you focus on the Freedom Ladder?
If you find yourself burned out or blocking others, you may be holding on to too much control. Alternatively, if you’ve delegated and chaos ensued, perhaps you jumped rungs too quickly.
Use the Freedom Ladder as a diagnostic tool:
- Are you giving too much freedom without enough support?
- Are you slowing things down by not trusting others to act?
- Are your team members clear on where they stand?
Staff-plus leadership isn’t about controlling more it’s about controlling less, better.
🧠 “The goal isn’t to climb the ladder alone—it’s to build a team that climbs together.”
Great leaders create space for others to rise, responsibly.