Ideas to give you the edge

Empowerment - is it practical, or an elusive ideal?

The police force are empowered to keep law and order by means of a government policy and a set of guidelines, or rules, governing their behavior – what they are and are not allowed to do. The policies and guidelines refer to the decisions they are allowed to make such as when to use force, when to take into custody or decisions on the length of time a suspect can be detained etc. The government is a higher order whose role includes empowering others to make some, but not all decisions.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
Aneurin Bevan
(1897 – 1960)
British Labour Politician

In organizations empowerment has, in recent years, risen to a high position on the human resource director’s agenda as a result of the stripping out of layers of middle management decision makers. Someone has to make the decisions, so it will have to rest with the people actually doing the work. But they won’t be allowed to decide everything – some things are not negotiable such as wage levels and structure, markets, headcount, investment etc. Looking for answers to the question “how much empowerment?” will lead you to the problems many organizations and individual managers struggle with when they attempt to introduce it.

This brief article is concerned more with the how of empowerment than the what, but first there is a more fundamental why question to answer. After all you may already be an empowering leader to a greater or lesser degree, or you may want to know more about the subject before you can convince yourself that it is worth the effort. Whatever motivation your experience and curiosity creates, it will be influenced by your values, and it will also be connected in some way to your identity and your beliefs. I invite you to think now about your own perceptions of you the leader, as you discover more about the type of leader you want to become.

Defining empowerment

The following definition of empowerment seems to be the most appropriate for the modern organization.

• Empowerment is a business methodology giving employees responsibility and authority for decisions at the level at which they operate.
• Empowerment challenges the traditional role of the manager as a decision maker/problem solver and redefines the role as an enabler/coach.

Empowerment is based around the concept that problems are best solved by the people working with the problem, and not by some higher order of management. This argument makes sense since the higher up the organization you get, the less you will know about operational problems. Total Quality Management initiatives are based upon this concept.

The difference empowerment makes

Organizational environments that empower people put fewer limitations and boundaries on structure. They nurture and reinforce learning cultures where change, skills, achievement and progress are high values, and rules and procedures are lower ones. They put more emphasis on contribution than status, and they reward achievement not responsibility – this results from a sincere belief that success is achieved through the tangible and measurable effects of people.

The empowered organization stimulates creativity and “off-the-wall” individuality bringing greater variety into people’s working day. It thrives on a degree of complexity and ambiguity, having the flexibility to respond in different ways to changes in market environments. It treats problems as opportunities and isn’t afraid of owning up to mistakes. A truly empowered organization is the organization of progress, achievement, and focus on the future.

In contrast to this, organizations that do not empower people often value status and position or knowledge and expertise over actual contribution. Procedure, process and protocol are more important than finding innovative solutions. Working norms are highly respected, and there are usually recognized ways of getting things done. Problems cause embarassment and often get swept under the carpet only to re-emerge at a later date. The disempowered organization is the organization of sameness, procedure, rules, protocol and focus on today.

There are many types of power produced by organizational cultures, and most of these emerge from one of three basic cultural orientations.

1 The authoritarian culture – coercive power

This is a traditional command and control culture that produces a coercive power. It identifies with hard, bottom line, results and stringent cost controls. It is a rule-maker. Its values are about position and status, who you are and what you have rather than what you can do, protocol, procedures, bureacracy, and legitimacy. Its beliefs about people tend to align behind McGregor’s theory – that people need to be controlled otherwise they will get away with as much as possible. Coercive power is produced by a management of mistrust, formality, authority and with respect for higher status regardless of contribution.

2 The technical culture – expert power

This culture is wrapped up in itself. It identifies with knowledge, skill, expertise and ingenuity. It is a technocrat and a judge. This culture values precision, facts, accuracy, competence, and judgment. Its beliefs about people are based on intelligence, knowledge and ingenuity. Expert power is produced by an intelligent, knowledgeable, expert management.

3 The learning culture – generative power

This is the culture of empowerment. It identifies with improvement, quality, change, fun, ingenuity, variety, and the future. It is a nurturer, enabler and a vehicle for achievement. When people leave it is often because they have been developed to a level at which they can only progress further in other environments. Partings are mutually agreeable and celebrated by both manager and employee. The learning culture values individual contributions rather than position or status and it is achievement oriented. It believes that future success is dependent upon the creative contribution of its people. It produces generative power – a power that it is able to continue generating itself without regular management intervention. Its generative power is produced by a nurturing, supporting and challenging management.

Culture and types of power

You will find that in reality few organizations fit exactly into one of these three cultures, but that they may have a mix of all three with one being the most predominant. For the remainder of this chapter I will focus on the learning culture, and the dynamics that produce generative power.

Conditions for producing generative power

There are some fundamental conditions that are typical of learning cultures and empowered organizations. These conditions form the system within which people can be nurtured and developed. It is also a system that has as few boundaries and constraints as possible to allow for the maximum amount of flexibility and change. Also, by virtue of empowering people, you are removing controlling influences, and this is probably one of the biggest hurdles a manager must overcome. A fundamental prerequisite for empowerment is the letting go of control mechanisms.

Trust develops as control is handed over. Many managers are afraid of the consequences of handing over control. It’s not losing control, more trusting it to others who are likely to interpret the meaning of control in their own way. Letting go of control then is the first step to trusting people, and trust is the main building block of empowerment. I like to think of it as a wheel where trust is the axle around which all the other conditions of empowerment spin.

The wheel is used to explain the relationship between the conditions. Like the spokes of a wheel, each condition provides the strength to support the others – they are interdependent relationships. If you take one away, the wheel will weaken and eventually collapse.  Without the spokes, the axle is an item without purpose.

There are five spokes to the wheel. Power is no use without the authority to use it. Clear guidance on the limits to authority must be given with a bias towards sufficient authority to reduce the span of control to a minimum (this will depend upon size of responsibility). In most cases this will be influenced by the decisions that need to be taken on a frequent enough basis to maintain levels of customer satisfaction.

Responsibility should also be clearly defined, specifically areas of shared responsibility. Intelligent decisions that stem from increased levels of authority and responsibility will depend upon knowledge of the business, and the best way to expand this is through involvement in the business – exposing people to new business areas and increasing their knowledge. People will want to feel supported when they are making decisions, taking risks and generally sticking their neck out.

The final spoke completes the wheel – managing people’s expectations. People don’t change their behavior just because you want them to. They need both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Whatever expectations you set, they must be manageable. This covers both expectations you have of your team (outcomes), and what they expect to get in return for investing their energy. Over-promising and under-delivering in both these areas is fatal.

Two important lessons about empowerment

1 Lesson number one – the easy solution

A few years ago it was possible to occupy your working week attending short conferences on the theme of empowerment. Just about every management consultancy firm was hosting one. Managers would be attracted by the buzz words and go along for a dose of “what to do,” only to find on their return to the workplace that just telling people they were being empowered to take important decisions wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t – what you had to do was go back and pay the management consultants to do it for you. They knew how to do it. Lesson number one is people do not become empowered overnight, or by being told they are now empowered.

2 Lesson number two – my people don’t want to be empowered

I can guarantee that either at the end of my leadership workshops, or at a follow-up and integration day, at least one person will ask “what do you do about people who don’t want to be empowered?” Well, you can’t win them all, can you? For some people the penny never seems to drop about how language gives clues to our behavior. The words . . . don’t want to be empowered . . . imply that someone has explicitly offered empowerment which of course isn’t going to work. You do not issue power as the government does with the police force, rather you provide the right conditions for power to be generated. There is a massive difference between the two. Make sure that your own thinking around the dynamics of empowerment is correct. Align your own levels of learning to create the conditions of empowerment which is not something you issue or something you do to others. It is a generative condition in response to a newly formed set of values and beliefs.

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