Empowerment: It is the “Why” of Delegation

Empowerment is not a new word in the domain of leadership and political correctness. It is, however, not a word comfortably associated with delegation. Most probably the word “delegation” is used as much as whatever popular word goes around.

Typically, delegation is spoken of as an event or action/verb. The camps for delegators and the not-delegators are clearly divided. The not-delegators have clear and solid reasons why not, and these reasons do not change because they have been on a training program. Frequently one hears reasons like: they cannot do the job; I cannot trust them that they would do it properly; the minute I stop watching, they stop delivering; they are so slow, it is better and faster if I take the job and do it myself. Given deadlines and the demand for results, they cannot easily be faulted with the arguments they use: it is for the good of the job and the company!

At Schuitema we have two anti-virus thoughts for countering not-delegating. One: leadership is producing people through results. Two: empowerment is expanding the range of decision making to include full accountability of the person for their total role contribution. Both these antivirus thoughts fall under the “grow” heading in the care and grow leadership model.

A few thoughts about empowerment, which can also be seen as a commercial for the one-day program, follow:

Continuous control of people doing the work is quick; is an effort to ensure it is done “my way”; is an assumed antidote to people not being able or willing to deliver to standards. This intent to take, and keep on taking, no matter how smartly influential the taker is, eventually has a reaction from the person who works under this control. At least three actions of resistance happen:

• An increase in skilled incompetence (Chris Argyris) in which people become very skilled at not doing that for which they should be held accountable
• The working person gets to a place where they cannot really be held accountable, because they do what they are told to do
• A subtler but destructive strategy is in progressively more upwards delegation: what is your answer; you do it; help me out, I am …; etc
• An extreme pattern that causes leaders to fail and sustaining life in a company is an increase in silence and undiscussables (currently called “the elephant in the room.”) Open discussions now become a threat, or are maliciously covering up mistakes, or is mapping out turf at the expense of the life of the company. This is sustained by subordinates when they have an unspoken arrangement not to acknowledge the skilled incompetence they are operating from: denying there are undiscussables.

Empowerment has two legs to stand on: trust and incremental release of control. They are like the Two Sandals needed to walk the journey. In order to do incremental release of control the working person need to give the evidence of their ability to do the work and deliver the results per their role contribution. The more evidence the person with authority have, the better they can make the decision to trust. The more the trust, the better and more delegation may happen. The meta-message is: I can be held accountable as I have means, ability and do master the process to get results.

Empowerment is not only giving, it is growing the person to their full potential: it is producing the best version of the person possible through the results they deliver.

How does the working person gift the supervisor? With loyalty and enthusiasm, called “engagement”. There are abundant research indicating that people go the extra mile because they have a constructive, trusting relationship with their senior. Trust is therefore a two-way street: trust becomes a pre-condition for trustworthiness.

In conclusion: both empowerment and delegation are steps in a process. They are not single events, but graded and disciplined actions. Empowerment and delegation are ways of demonstrating accountability and being gifted with more and more grow opportunities.