Having empowered employees is the dream of every leader. Empowered employees are capable and accountable. They are competent and are mature enough to own their responsibilities. Empowering employees is about maximizing their potential. When we empower them we do not only improve their abilities and competencies, we help them become more mature and more responsible. This is great but leaders often do not understand the real truth about empowerment in business.
To get empowerment right, the leader needs to do three things. Firstly the leader must give his people the means. Secondly he must teach them the ability. Lastly he must hold them accountable. However, even if leaders understand that they must give the means, teach the ability and hold their people accountable, they sometimes still struggle with empowerment.
One of the reasons that leaders sometimes struggle is because they have a narrow understanding of what empowerment and employee growth includes. It is very common in organisations for leaders to think of empowerment and growth only in terms of “climbing the corporate ladder”. Leaders tend to think that if they can’t promote the person, then they can’t do anything to empower that person.
I recently had a conversation with a leader who told me, “the only way I can empower my people more is to give them my job.” I disagreed with him. The reason I thought he was mistaken was because I thought he didn’t have a clear understanding of the essence of empowerment.
Empowerment and Control:
Leaders often fail to recognise the way in which empowerment involves the incremental suspension of control. Empowering people is actually about gradually letting go of control. Leaders will often forget about empowerment simply because there is no promotion on offer, not realising that there are very many decisions that currently sit in their hands that could actually sit in the hands of employees. Gradually letting go of control means slowly putting decision making power back in the hands of employees.
This is not about doing grand things. There is a simple question one can ask of people in an organisation to quickly get a sense of how much empowerment is actually taking place: “who is making the decisions regarding your daily functions?” This question points straight to the heart of what empowerment actually involves, the incremental suspension of control.
Leaders only get this right when they do things slowly. They should ideally work one decision at a time. They should engage each employee to discover what decision is that employee currently in the position to start making themselves. It could be as simple as no longer needing the leader’s approval to send a weekly financial report, or having the authority to sign off on safety protocols, or whatever. Once the relevant decision has been identified, the leader must the teach the ability, provide the means, and then hold the person accountable.
When we look at empowerment in this way we see that leaders can easily miss a whole lot. What they neglect is the extremely valuable opportunity to give their staff a greater sense of control over their own domain of work. This is actually what personal growth is all about, expanding one’s experienced areas of personal control. An empowered person feels in control of and personally accountable for their work. It is not about being a CEO, it is about being the master of your personal work environment.
I jut recently had the pleasure of witnessing a colleague, Joshua Hayman, talk a team of executives through the issue of empowerment and control. What became very clear to this group when talking to Josh was that they had all failed to realise how much room they had to further empower their people. The simple reason for this was that they failed to recognised that they were making many of the decisions that should actually be getting made by their employees.
Very often, helping organisations get empowerment right is not about teaching them how to do it by explaining means, ability and accountability. Rather, as was demonstrated by Joshua Hayman, the help organisations need is overcoming their limited understanding of what empowerment means. It is about opening their eyes to how much potential there is for empowerment tot ake place in their immediate work environments.